Specifying and Promulgating Achievement Standards

Assessment practices, both at the classroom level and for the award of certificates, have traditionally followed norm-referenced principles, although in recent years there has been an increasing interest in criterion-referenced assessment. In the first part of this article, another approach (referred to as standards-referenced assessment) is outlined. Sharing much of the motivation and philosophy of criterion-referenced assessment, it makes direct and extensive use of teachers’ qualitative judgments. In principle, standards-referenced assessment is applicable to a wide variety of school subjects, and attempts to provide external, visible standards for the use of both teachers and students. In the second part of the article, four methods of specifying and promulgating educational standards are identified and described. The four make use of numerical cut-offs, tacit knowledge, exemplars, and verbal descriptions. It is argued that the last two of these taken together provide the most promising framework for a standards-referenced assessment system within which teachers may make sound qualitative judgments about the achievements of their students both for improving learning and for summative reporting.