with Clare Zagorski, Assessment Strategy & Quality Manager, Essential Assessment
Ever wondered what it takes to create a truly effective educational assessment? It’s far more than just writing questions.
This article takes you inside Essential Assessment’s meticulous process for developing high-quality assessment content—specifically designed for the new Victorian Mathematics Curriculum 2.0. You’ll discover the precision, expertise and thoughtful design that turn a simple test into a powerful tool for diagnosing student understanding.
Education is Not Static: It’s Constantly Evolving
Educational curricula evolve every six or seven years, and with each update comes the need for assessments that align seamlessly with new learning objectives. Essential Assessment responds rapidly to these changes, ensuring complete coverage of an updated curriculum.
The Pillars of Assessment Design
So, how does EA’s team of content writers build these highly responsive and comprehensive assessments from scratch? The process rests on a few critical pillars.
1. Assessment Types: Unlike assessments that sample only parts of the curriculum, EA offers:
- Strand assessments addressing every content description and achievement standard—providing a comprehensive, diagnostic view of each student’s knowledge rather than a limited snapshot.
- Topic-based assessments focus on evaluating students’ understanding of specific units or themes in a structured and sequential manner. In this approach, students engage more deeply with a particular subject or concept, allowing them to explore it in detail before moving on to the next topic.
- Flexi-assessments allow educators to create their assessments by selecting specific content descriptions/indicators that align with their classroom objectives. This flexibility enables teachers to tailor the quantity and focus of the assessment to suit their students’ current learning needs, offering an added layer of customisation beyond standard assessments.
2. Optimum Assessment Length: This involves determining the basic structure of the assessment. EA bundles assessments into year-level ranges to enhance their diagnostic value. A key consideration here is managing cognitive load—the mental effort required by the student. The aim is to find a sweet spot where the assessment is fair and measured, providing solid data without overwhelming the student with excessive length or complexity.
3. Code Density Analysis: This pillar involves a deep analysis of the curriculum itself. The team dissects each content descriptor to understand its ‘code density’—the breadth and complexity of the knowledge, skills, and concepts packed within it. This foundational analysis is like mapping the terrain before building the road; it provides essential direction for the entire assessment design.
4. The Power of ‘Isolated Constructs’: Perhaps the most surgical part of the process is breaking down content descriptors into ‘micro-concepts’ to ‘uniquely isolate measurable constructs.’ This principle of creating isolated constructs is crucial for validity. It means that any single question is deliberately designed to measure only one specific skill or piece of knowledge. A question testing concept A will only measure A, not A plus B. This precision ensures that if a student struggles with a question, the assessment can pinpoint the exact knowledge gap, turning a mistake into a precise guide for targeted learning. To ensure this level of precision, questions undergo rigorous validation, including multiple rounds of internal review and psychometric analysis to eliminate any ‘construct-irrelevant variance’—elements that might contaminate question efficacy.
5. Guiding Cognitive Verbs: Cognitive verbs are the key metacognitive processes students are expected to use. These verbs, ranging from lower-level actions like ‘identify’ to higher-level thinking like ‘evaluate’ or ‘calculate’, provide strong clues about the best type of question to use. More simply: cognitive verbs inform the task design. The example below shows the action the student must take and are linked to proficiencies; from basic understanding to complex problem-solving and reasoning.
From Theory to Practice: A Curriculum Example
Let’s make this concrete with an example from the Level 4 measurement component of the Victorian Curriculum version 2.0. The content descriptor ‘VC2M4M04’ states that students must: ‘estimate and compare angles using angle names, including acute, obtuse, straight angle, reflex, and revolution, and recognise their relationship to a right angle.’
EA dissects this single descriptor into distinct micro-concepts:
- Concept 1: Visually compare and estimate angle sizes against a right angle.
- Concept 2: Compare angles using specific names like ‘acute’ and ‘obtuse’.
- Concept 3: Recognise an angle’s size benchmarked against a right angle.
This meticulous breakdown incorporates the cognitive verbs taken from the code and ensures every part of the content descriptor is comprehensively covered.
6. Ensuring Reliability Over Time
Another critical design principle is the notion of parity. This occurs with the provision of equivalent pre-, mid-, and post-assessment questions. These question sequences act as rigorously calibrated, interchangeable tools that control for variables, ensuring that measurement of a concept is consistent and comparable over time. This is essential for reliably tracking a student’s progress and trusting that a change in score reflects genuine learning, not just a variation in the test itself.
7. Beyond the Content: Accessibility and Inclusivity
The rigour of the design process also extends to broader factors like accessibility and inclusivity. This means designing straightforward questions and removing unnecessary complexities, convoluted wording, or unfamiliar cultural references that might hinder a student who understands the underlying concept. The goal is to create an assessment environment where every student has the best possible opportunity to demonstrate what they truly know, unconfounded by potential bias.
A New Perspective on Testing
Crafting an educational assessment is a process of extraordinary detail and rigour. It’s not simply about right or wrong answers-it’s about measuring knowledge in a way that is systematic, fair, and reliable, so educators and learners alike can trust the data it provides.
For students, this perspective can be transformative. An assessment is no longer just a hurdle to clear, but a set of precisely designed diagnostic tools. Every question is a deliberate instrument, created to uncover one specific aspect of understanding and point the way toward the next step in learning.
Our flexible, curriculum-aligned assessment materials are designed to enhance teaching and learning. We’d love to support your school’s assessment approach, speak with us to learn how Essential Assessment can help.
