Assignment #5: Task models and your assessment

The assignment is to analyze your example assessment with respect to task models. A task model is a framework for creating situations that will provide the opportunity to observe students say, do, or make something that provides evidence about the knowledge or skill you want to assess. Slides 10 - 12 of the presentation Introduction to Task Design contain the key ideas. Every assessment has tasks; in this assignment, you are to look at tasks from a higher level of abstraction, through the lens of the task model, as to the rationale behind the particular features that appear in selected tasks in your assessment. Any given task may be thought of as one specific instance of many that could have been produced in accordance with the task model it came from (slide 10).

Exactly how this assignment will play out with your assessment will vary from one student to another, depending on how these issues were handled by the designers of your assessment. In all cases, though, work through the categories discussed on slides 11 and 12.

• Some assessments provide rationales and templates for tasks, giving you almost everything you would want to put into a task model. Good; you got lucky this time! Describe one or more of them.

• Other assessments have groups of items that are clearly similar, and you may be able to conceive of them as instances generated from the task model, even if the designers didn't think of them this way. Describe what would be in a plausible task model for one of these groups of items.

• And some assessments consist of essentially unique tasks. If this is your situation, pick a task. It has its own features; create a task model in which some of these features would be constant, in order to keep providing evidence about certain aspects of knowledge or skill, while others could be varied to lead to new tasks that are different on the surface but share a similar evidentiary skeleton.

Describe at least one task model; more if it makes sense for your example. Your paper should be about four pages long.