Education Commons^™

Assessing What Students Know: Effects Of Assessment Type On Spelling Performance And Relation To Working Memory, Alysha M. Calleia, Steven J. Howard

Journal of Student Engagement: Education Matters

A central objective of educational assessment is to maximise the accuracy (validity) and consistency (reliability) of the methods used to assess students’ competencies. Different tests, however, often employ different methods of assessing the same domain-specific skills (e.g., spelling). As a result, questions have arisen concerning the legitimacy of using these various modes interchangeably as a proxy for students’ abilities. To investigate the merit of these contentions, this study examined university students’ spelling performance across three commonly employed test modalities (i.e., dictation, error correction, proofreading). To further examine whether these test types vary in the cognitive load they place on test …