Knowing Where We’re Going in Assessment

Yogi Berra once said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up someplace else.” Perhaps nowhere is this more applicable than when we think about how we assess our students: A, B, C, D, F; A+, A, A−, B+, B, B−, C+, C, C−; 4.0, 3.5, 3.0, 2.5, 2.0; H, P, F; points off for being late, no points for missed work, extra points for work handed in on time; Competencies, Experiences, Thresholds.

In an article titled “Remaking the Grade, From A to D” (Chronicle of Higher Education, September 14, 2009; http://chronicle.com/article/Remaking-the-Grade-From-A-to/48352/), leadership and learning expert Douglas B. Reeves asks educators to think about how grading policies influence student performance and behavior. He specifically comments on the accuracy, fairness, and effectiveness of grading policies. In the area of effectiveness, he challenges faculty members to ask themselves: “Were my students last semester more engaged, responsive, and successful than students in previous years?” If the answer is yes, then he says the grading policies are working. He mentions remaining surprised at how many faculty members complain that their students are “disrespectful, inattentive, disengaged, and unresponsive,” while at the same time the teachers use the same grading policies year after year. He observes that athletes and students learning music are not given midterms, finals, or averages. Instead, they are given feedback and coached for the purpose of improving performance. He also makes an interesting comment on how students in this generation receive feedback while playing video games and thus move very rapidly from being novices to expert players!

Curriculum reform has been a central theme for many dental schools, for the American Dental Education Association (ADEA) through the work of the ADEA Commission on Change and Innovation in Dental Education (ADEA CCI), and for the Commission on Dental Accreditation (CODA) through the revised predoctoral standards; and many curricular changes involve interdisciplinary teaching, integration, and problem-based and critical thinking exercises. If we do not align our assessments to match our curriculum objectives, our best efforts will fail. We have to ensure that our students reach at least minimal levels of competence on many different fronts. Knowledge base, attitudes, values, and skills are all a part of what we are asked to assess on a daily basis. Since choosing the right type of assessment in each area is critical to our students’ success, we should use summative assessments to judge knowledge base or clinical competence, and we should use formative assessments for the development of attitudes, values, and skills.

This month’s Journal of Dental Education includes several articles that address recent attempts to improve assessment in various settings. We hear about how dental students can study for national board exams using an online review platform, and we learn from the board exam developers how they use practice analyses to assess validity and how models for reporting results to schools have recently changed. Another article describes a reliability study conducted to refine case-based questions on the National Board Dental Hygiene Examination, while another explains how researchers analyzed the use of distractors in multiple-choice examinations as a way to improve assessment in an oral and maxillofacial pathology course.

Whatever the setting, our challenge is to create the right balance of feedback-driven formative assessment in the areas of attitudes, values, and skills. These types of assessments—such as objective simulated clinical examinations (OSCEs), triple jumps, oral presentations, and portfolios—are time-consuming and are sometimes viewed as being “softer” assessments. However, their importance in coaching our students to improve their performance can no longer be ignored. At the journal, we have received and will continue to receive manuscripts on the development, implementation, and outcomes of these formative assessments, as members of the community of dental educators share their findings and experiences in this vital area of concern. This is all to the good since, as Yogi Berra also said, “You can observe a lot just by watching.”