Summarizing and Analyzing Assessment Results-Suskie Ch 16

This chapter is a little difficult to summarize in a blog, as it is comprehensive and all encompassing regarding our assessment results. However, here are some points to consider:
- Most assessments results can be summarized with simple tallies and percentages (the more direct and concise, the better).
-Error margins, which are easy to estimate, provide important information on the precision of assessment results.
-Good multiple choice items discriminate well between students who do well and poorly on the overall test.
-Keep a sample of good, bad and mediocre student work on file to provide firsthand evidence of your standards and rigor.

Analysis of results must occur before we can start sharing them and discussing them. There are several questions that must be answered first:
1. What kinds of standards are you using?
2. What kind of results do you have (qualitative, categorical, ordered, scaled, or dichotomous)?
3. Will you use technology to summarize and analyze your results? This is a highly recommended component of the anlysis. It beats doing it all by hand.

There are several ways to summarize results:
1. Tallies
2. Percentages
3. Aggregates
4. Averages
5. Qualitative summaries

We must evaluate the quality of our assessment strategies. Suskie recommends examining the following questions:
1. How well does your sample reflect all your students?
2. How precise are our sample results?
3. How difficult is each test item?
4. How well does each test item discriminate between hogh and low scorers?
5. Do other assessments corroborate your findings?
6. Do results fall in appropriate patterns?

Another point to ponder is whether we should analyze our results in varying ways. Finally, the chapter ends with a discussion of documentation and storage of the data collected.