The assignment is to analyze your example assessment with respect to the perspectives of psychology discussed in class and in the reading. "Advances in the sciences of thinking and learning" (National Research Council, 2002). In particular, how did the developers of the assessment seem to be thinking about the knowledge, skills, and/or abilities they want to assess in the assessment, and how did they construct tasks that would give them evidence they thought would be useful for doing so?

For example, in John Anderson's intelligent tutoring system for learning to program in the LISP computer language, Anderson took an information-processing perspective in defining a set of hundreds of production rules that he posited constitute knowledge of LISP. He then used behavioral psychology in his exercises that taught students these rules.

In some of your assessments, the developers provide you with information that tells you about their psychological perspective. In others, you will have to infer what they may have had in mind, given the how the assessment is used and what kinds of tasks they use.

There is probably one or a mixture of a couple of psychological perspectives that is at the heart of your assessment. concentrate on this. If you have comments from other perspectives, add them. For example, a test that is motivated from a trait perspective (e.g., "mathematics aptitude") does present tasks that need to be solved by an individual, so comments from an information-processing perspective about the knowledge, operations, information structures, and representation forms that are required to solve the tasks are involved and may be commented on. That same test is given in a social situation, and is meant to support inferences about behavior in other social situations; how well they match up is one kind of comment you might make from a sociocultural perspective.

In this assignment, the focus is on the nature of knowledge, skill, ability, or capabilities that the designers of the test intend to measure. You do not need to address statistical/measurement issues in this paper, and as for other aspects of assessment we have not discussed in detail yet (such as evidence identification / task scoring or models for tasks), you need only make observations as they seem useful to you at this point to understanding the psychological perspective of the assessment.

Your paper should be two to four pages total.