Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

I'm not sure who is responsible for the headline, but it gives the appearance of conflasting validity with reliability. Lynch is writing about validity. Using a test designed foir summative evaluation as a pre-test, he says, is a case where the test isn't measuring what it is supposed to. So "Baseline testing is deeply flawed. It will damage children and schools," Lynch writes. "Giving an end-of-term summative assessment test at the beginning of the term before the children have covered the content, is using a test (summative assessment) against its purpose – it is not assessing what it is designed to do." Well, it is assessing math knowledge, but at a time when (presumably) students don't yet have that knowledge. That doesn't make it invalid.

p.s. for clarification, "Generally speaking, reliability means the extent to which 2 assessments of something are the same... Validity means the extent to which our inspections and judgements assess what they're supposed to. Both reliability and validity matter" (Finch, 2019).

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
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Last Updated: Mar 28, 2024 7:23 p.m.

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