Defining educational measurement and describing its innovations and future

In the last eight weeks, I have learned about different topics regarding educational measurement as can be seen in the previous six blogposts. In this post I would like to summarize and define educational measurement based on those six topics, discuss innovations and the future of educational measurement, and what my contribution/role could be in this field.

What is educational measurement?

Definitions of educational measurement in literature focus on the skill or knowledge measured and the tool to measure the skill or knowledge. Cito formulates educational measurement as the “objective measurements of the knowledge, skills and competencies of your students and professionals” (“Educational Measurement,” n.d.), while another definition, provided by St. Thomas University defines measurement as “determining the attributes or dimensions of an object, skill or knowledge” (“Importance of Educational Measurement, Assessment and Evaluation,” 2018). To measure a skill or knowledge in a reliable way, tests should meet certain standards. When looking at the previous blog posts, I would say that the definition of educational measurement should at least include the aspects, development of a test, assessing the quality of the test, making decisions about how much needs to be answered correctly to pass the test, analysing data that is generated during a test, and being aware of fraud. Combining the definitions found online with the information provided during the course, I would propose the following definition for educational measurement:

Educational measurement entails the development, quality assessment, standard setting, analysing data, and detection of fraud of a test or assignment.

What are the upcoming innovations in educational measurement?

When thinking about innovation, I easily wander into the field of technology and search for opportunities to improve or support the current practices. Over the last years, technology has had a big impact on how test are developed, made, and analysed (Zenisky & Sireci, 2002). The development in the field of test construction is visible in computerized adaptive testing (CAT). CAT selects items from an item bank based on the level of the test taker, in this way fewer items are needed to measure the ability of the test taker (Henk van der Kolk, 2018). This type of testing would not be possible without the technological advancements existing nowadays. Also, the collection of data worldwide (PISA) is easier with the current technology available. Finding schools to participate, distributing the tests and surveys, and collecting the data are all important aspects in this research that are positively influenced by the development of technology. Lastly, running analyses on big data or doing statistical analyses to detect fraud is easier to do with the software that is developed to carry out those analyses.

What will educational measurement look like in the future?

For the future, I think it is important that the field of technology is researched and used to support and improve the field of educational measurement. There have been so many improvements already over the last years, and I assume that these improvements will continue in the coming years. New technologies or software that is developed might increase the quality and speed of analyses on data and new programs might make it easier to distribute tests and collect data. Security of those programs and software need to evolve as well to keep up with new ways people will try to steal items from an item bank, or the concept item bank might be changed or improved so that is more difficult to hack such a system.

What role would I like to fulfil as an educational specialist in the future (of educational measurement) described above?

Educational measurement consists of various aspects which makes it a broad field. Referring to the definition given in the beginning, of those aspects, I would like to contribute to the field of analysing test data, either for learning purposes or fraud detection. In combination with the development of technology in the future, I think this is a promising area for research. Studying the current field to find what can be improved and researching how current technological development can help and support those improvements seems interesting, relevant, and important.

References

Educational Measurement. (n.d.). Retrieved June 5, 2020, from https://www.cito.com/we-are/educational-measurement

Henk van der Kolk. (2018, June 14). Computerized Adaptive Testing [Video file]. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jckSV5vHSIs

Importance of Educational Measurement, Assessment and Evaluation. (2018). Retrieved June 5, 2020, from determining the attributes or dimensions of an object, skill or knowledge

Zenisky, A. L., & Sireci, S. G. (2002). Applied measurement in education: A review of strategies for validating computer-automated scoring. Applied Measurement in Education, 15(4), 337–362. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15324818AME1504