Writing Assessments

Types of Assessments

The first step in writing an assessment is to decide whether you need a traditional assessment or an alternative assessment, or both.

1. Traditional assessments are conventional paper-pencil tests that include true-false, matching, multiple-choice, sentence-completion, and essay items.
2. Alternative assessments include performance and portfolio assessments.

The type of assessment you choose should reflect the type of activities the students completed during instruction as they learned the material. If students have been reading, writing, and discussing the material, a traditional assessment may be the right choice. If students have been performing, constructing, or creating material, an alternative assessment may be needed.

Also consider the skills of your students when choosing the type of assessment and assessment items. Assessments should accommodate students’ developmental level across grades. Children in early childhood education will need assessments that require limited reading and writing skills. Students in elementary and middle school grades will need assessments that allow for mostly concrete thinking, and older students can typically handle more abstract assessments. Recall the general development of cognitive skills across childhood described in Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development as you write the assessment. [Link to information about Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development in the Effective Instruction chapter will be added here.]

Also, check that your students have the necessary test-taking and language skills to complete an assessment successfully before you administer it. When an assessment requires students to have skills beyond just the knowledge intended to be assessed, and students do not yet have those skills, it is not a valid assessment for those students.

Selected-response items are those where the answer is provided. The students only need to recognize the answer to complete the item. These include true-false, matching, and multiple-choice items.

Constructed-response assessment items, on the other hand, require students to provide the answer. These include sentence-completion items and essays.

Next, we will describe each type of selected-response and constructed-response assessment item and provide guidelines for writing them.

Selected-Response Assessment Items

True-false assessment items are statements that students identify as either true or false. The items should be written carefully to ensure that every part of the statement is clearly either true or false. True-false items do not generally require higher-level cognitive processing skills because students are only required to recognize whether facts are true or false.

While true-false items are generally easy to write, a disadvantage of them is that there is a 50% chance of students choosing the correct answer by simply guessing. Therefore, they may not actually assess students’ knowledge. A way to improve true-false items is to have students rewrite all false statements to make them true.

Matching assessment items ask students to identify two pieces of information that are related. Usually, two columns of words or phrases about information in the unit of study are presented to students and they choose one from each column to make pairs that are associated. Matching items do not generally require higher-level cognitive processing skills because students are required to only remember related pieces of information.

Pictures are often used for matching items in early childhood classrooms where some students may not yet be able to read words and phrases. In later grades, matching items can be made more challenging by having a different number of items in the columns and using some words/phrases in multiple matches or not at all. It is important that the directions state whether each word/phrase in a column can be matched to more than one in the other column and if there are words/phrases that do not match to any in the other column.

Multiple-choice assessment items include a question or an incomplete statement followed by a list of response options for students to choose from to answer the question or complete the sentence. The question/statement is called the stem. The response options in the list that are not the correct answer are called distractors because they distract the student from choosing the correct option in the list. Effective multiple-choice assessment items use distractors that are plausible answers, so that students need detailed knowledge of the material being assessed to choose the correct response.

The stem portion of a multiple-choice item should be as brief and clear as possible so that the meaning is understood by students. When using a stem that is an incomplete statement, check that each response choice makes sense grammatically to complete the statement. Also, the distractors should be a similar length to the correct response so the length of the response choices is not a clue to the correct answer.

Constructed-Response Assessment Items

Sentence-completion assessment items ask students to supply missing words or phrases in sentences. Each sentence has underscored spaces to indicate the missing word or phrase. Sentence-completion items can be more challenging for students than the selected-response assessment items, like matching and multiple choice, because students need to recall the information from the unit needed to construct their response. Possible answers are not provided. Note that if a word bank of answers is provided, it would then be considered a matching type of selected-response assessment item rather than a constructed-response assessment item.  

When you write sentence-completion assessment items, make all the underscored spaces in all of the sentences the same length, so the length of the spaces is not a clue to the correct answer. Avoid asking students to provide more than one word/phrase in a sentence because without the context of an almost full sentence, it may be difficult for the students to figure out the information needed to complete the sentence.

Essay assessment items ask students to write about specific content from a unit of study. They can be used to give students a higher-level of cognitive challenge – to synthesize, evaluate, and create information.

Because essay assessment items typically ask students to write about specific information, you may need to include several essay questions to assess knowledge of a broad range of unit content. To manage the amount of time needed to complete the assessment you can specify a required limit for the length of the responses. For example, students can be given a maximum number of sentences or paragraphs they should write in their response to each essay item.

It is important to give the students specific directions about the topics they should address. Giving general directions, like simply asking them to “discuss” a topic, may cause confusion about the information they should include in their answer.  Provide as many details as possible to guide their work.

It can be helpful to write an example response yourself to ensure your directions are specific enough and to determine the approximate amount of time it may take students to write an answer to the essay question. Your example response can then be used as a guide to your evaluation of students’ work as your grade the essays and provide specific feedback to each student.

Keep in mind if you choose to use essay items that, in general, they may take less time to write than other assessment items, but they typically require substantially more time for students to complete and for you to read and grade.

Writing Alternative Assessments

Alternative assessments are considered to be more authentic assessments because they ask students to demonstrate their knowledge in realistic contexts.  For example, an authentic assessment of oral language proficiency would have students speak the language. An authentic assessment of science laboratory skills would have students demonstrate those skills using laboratory equipment in the laboratory setting. Two types of alternative assessment include performances and portfolios.

Performance assessments give students the opportunity to demonstrate a range of complex skills and knowledge. They are especially useful in demonstrating skills in subjects such as oral language, voice and instrumental music, dance, art, and debate where performance is a natural component of learning the material. Performance assessments can be used in other subject areas as well. Reading skills in early childhood are best assessed by observing a child read text of interest to them. Similarly, observations of individual students as they solve mathematics problems or conduct science experiments can be effective assessments.

Students should be given detailed guidance as they prepare for performance assessments, including the expected components of their performance and the criteria on which they will be evaluated. A rubric is a common tool used for providing students with the criteria for evaluation and grading. Rubrics list the skills and knowledge to be assessed, and the points students can earn based on the level of proficiency they demonstrate during the performance.  The rubric should be given to the students before the assessment to help them prepare for the performance, and then used by the instructor during the performance to evaluate and grade each student’s work.

Portfolio assessments are alternative assessments that ask students to compile a collection of their work across a period of time to illustrate their learning. For example, students in an English composition class or an art class would include the major assignments from a school year in their portfolio. Students are typically required to reflect on the improvement in their skills across that time and write a description of the specific ways the work included in the portfolio documents their progress in learning.

Beginning when the first assignments are completed, you should periodically discuss with the class the purpose for developing the portfolio and the process they will use to build it. This will help them keep track of the work they intend to include in the portfolio, remind them to note their progress in the class, and help them prepare to write about it.  Consider providing a rubric to guide the students’ work and your grading of the portfolio assessment.

Writing portfolio assessment items is similar to writing essay assessment items. It is important to provide specific and clear instructions so students can complete the assessment successfully. In addition to asking students to reflect on the progress they have made over the time represented by the work examples they gathered for the portfolio, you can customize the assessment by asking them to explain which assignment they found most challenging, most engaging, and so forth.

Preparing to Administer the Assessment

After you have written a class assessment, guided by a table of specifications, review it carefully to check that each item is written clearly. Every section of the assessment should begin with brief and complete directions to the students about how to complete the items in the section.

Make a key for all selected-response and sentence-completion items on the assessment so you are prepared to grade them. Write a model answer for each constructed-response item and develop a rubric for any essay, performance, and portfolio items.

Plan to share information from the table of specifications and any rubrics with your students to guide their preparation for the assessment. If possible, schedule a class period to review the material that will be assessed and to answer any questions the students have about the assessment.

The types of assessment items students expect on the assessment will guide the way they study for the assessment. When assessments use selected-response items, students will need to recognize the correct response, so familiarity with the material will be sufficient. When assessments include constructed-response items the students will need to be prepared to recall information without any cues. Keep this in mind as you design assessments and prepare students to complete them.

Textbook Test Banks

Some textbook publishers provide collections of assessment items. These are often selected-response items — true-false, matching, and multiple-choice questions — but other assessment item types may be provided as well, depending on the subject material in the textbook. If a test bank is available from the publisher of the textbook you are using, and you are considering adopting some of the items, check that those you are going to use are well-written and fit the needs of your class. Generally, you can edit them for clarity and to match the learning objectives and topics that were the focus of your instruction. It is important to use a table of specifications to design the assessment even when you are using a publisher’s test bank.