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A comparative judgement approach to teacher assessment

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journal contribution
posted on 2015-09-07, 14:55 authored by Suzanne McMahon, Ian JonesIan Jones
We report one teacher’s response to a top-down shift from external examinations to internal teacher assessment for summative purposes in the Republic of Ireland. The teacher adopted a comparative judgement approach to the assessment of secondary students’ understanding of a chemistry experiment. The aims of the research were to investigate whether comparative judgement can produce assessment outcomes that are valid and reliable without producing undue workload for the teachers involved. Comparative judgement outcomes correlated as expected both with test marks and with existing student achievement data, supporting the validity of the approach. Further analysis suggested that teacher judgement privileged scientific understanding, whereas marking privileged factual recall. The estimated reliability of the outcome was acceptably high, but comparative judgement was notably more time-consuming than marking. We consider how validity and efficiency might be improved and the contributions that comparative judgement might offer to summative assessment, moderation of teacher assessment and peer assessment.

Funding

The research reported here was funded by a Royal Society Shuttleworth Education Research Fellowship.

History

School

  • Science

Department

  • Mathematics Education Centre

Published in

Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy and Practice

Citation

MCMAHON, S. and JONES, I., 2014. A comparative judgement approach to teacher assessment. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy and Practice, 22 (3), pp. 368-389.

Publisher

© Taylor and Francis

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2014

Notes

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy and Practice on 16th October 2014 available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969594X.2014.978839

ISSN

0969-594X

eISSN

1465-329X

Language

  • en

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