Why Access?

Process: Instruction, outcomes, and assessment

The relationships among purpose, information, interpretation, and decision making are easy to imagine. Our reasons for evaluating students' learning will determine the kind of information we seek, how we collect it, how we interpret it, and how we use it. In this "Why assess?" section, we focus on purpose. The remaining components are treated in other sections.

In most classroom assessment, tests and other forms of evaluation are linked to instruction. Instruction and assessment, if they are to be well matched, should both be included in the planning process.

The needs of learners are also important in planning for instruction and assessment. Cohen (1994) writes that language assessment promotes "meaningful involvement of students with material that is central to the teaching objectives of a given course. For this meaningful involvement to take place, the goals of the assessment tasks need to reflect the goals of the course, and these goals need to be made clear to the students (p. 13)."

If all goes well, instruction results in observable outcomes in learners, and assessment provides the means to measure how well goals have been met. The results of various forms of assessment usually comprise the bulk of what is reported to students, parents, and administrators about student achievement.