Spring 2025: The Many Faces of Assessment
Location: ERIC 201/301 on Wednesdays from 4-5pm
In educational environments, most researchers, practitioners, and students see the value and appeal of curriculum and instruction. On the other hand, assessments are often viewed at best as a necessary evil. The terms “test/exam/assessment” conjure images of multiple-choice tests, written exams, or essays. For instructors, tests often represent effort – in scoring and evaluating student performance. The results of high-stakes assessments (state reading/math outcome tests, SAT, ACT, TOEFL) are used to determine a student’s future opportunities – whether they will be promoted to the next grade, get into a college program of their choice, be able to study abroad, or be granted a professional certification. Tests can determine what is taught (and valued) in a course and are consequently the source of the perennial student question – “is this going to be on the test?” Since assessments cannot be separated from values, assessment bias can unfairly impact diverse populations of students based on race, gender identity, socioeconomic status, neurodiversity, and other intertwined individual differences.
However, assessments are and can be more. They come in many shapes and sizes and are deployed in various settings, with different functions and purposes that serve and shape learning and instruction. The data stemming from them often also serves as the engines that drive educational programs and policy. They need not be anxiety-provoking endurance tests. They can be engines of positive change.
The nature of assessment development, delivery, and uses/practices are undergoing rapid change in response to technological advances such as genAI (and LLMs). In the midst of these rapid advances, there are new opportunities for designers and researchers to consider how these new technologies might produce assessments that are fairer, more just, and perhaps even interesting and engaging.
In this seminar series, speakers will probe the many faces of assessment – from design and measurement innovations such as scenario-based, project-based, simulation, portfolio, stealth, or dynamic assessments to large-scale national and worldwide testing programs. The series will place extra emphasis on critical views of current assessment practices and reforms underway to reconceptualize assessments to make them fairer, more equitable, and justice-oriented, in order to better serve diverse audiences and how these practices inform our use of large language models (LLMs) and other forms of AI to design assessments that are reliable, valid, and fair.
John Sabatini
Distinguished Research Professor
Institute for Intelligent Systems and
Department of Psychology
University of Memphis
Karen Weddle-West, Ph.D.
Professor, Educational Psychology and Research
College of Education
University of Memphis
Lalo Salmerón
Catedrático de Psicología de la Educación
Vicedecano de Movilidad e Intercambio
Facultat de Psicología – Universitat de València
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