assessment

Educational assessment - is the process of documenting, usually in measurable terms, knowledge, skills, attitudes and beliefs. Assessment can focus on the individual learner, the learning community (class, workshop, or other organized group of learners), the institution, or the educational system as a whole

Function:

Assessment serves to test if the student has reached the educational-objective (see definition-of-educational-objective).
The results should be returned together with constructive feedback to the student, so that he/she can, in a sense of lifelong-learning work to improve his competences.
Furthermore assessment in one way or another is indispensible, when official certification is given, where quality, comparability and validity have to be assured.

Ways of achieving function:

Assessment can take various forms:

Who is assessing:

• Self-assessment:
• the student can assess his/her own achievement by him-/herself (e.g. online-test with automatic feedback)
• assessment by fellow-students
• Assessment by a teacher/ examiner

Timing:

• monitoring of learning progress: continuous evaluation during the learning process
• short-term-assessment: assessment of single or few learning tasks
• long-term-assessment: in a sense of a final assessment after a whole learning-unit

General types of assessment:

• written
• oral
• practical
• observation of the learner
• combined

Specific types of assessment:

• Questionnaire:
• multible choice
• true/false
• fill in blank
• drag & drop
• open questions 
• essays/ papers:
• invenstigation
• critical reflection
• summary
• practical work/ products (Video, Poster, webpage, collage, …)
• projects
• portfolios
• case studies
• presentation

Formative assessment / evaluation
occurs during each learning task and aims to inform both the student and the teacher/trainer on the degree of knowledge, skills and attitudes achieved and possibly to discover where and how a student faces learning difficulties in order to offer or let him/her discover strategies to enable progress, (G. de Landsheere, 1979). It is not a knowledge assessment, but a "query" on the learning process, a reflection on learning activities. The formative evaluation model involves a verification of results during the teaching process, performed on smaller sequences.

Summative assessment
is achieved by partial verification during the program and an overall estimate of the results for longer periods, does not accompany the teaching process, and therefore allows its improvement only after relatively long periods; realizes a „certification” of achieved knowledge, skills and attitudes, by checking only the final results which are then communicated to the outside, sometimes for obtaining a hierarchy, allows to perform a complex and multidimensional analysis; includes the production of a value judgment on the overall effects (expected or unexpected), on the actors and on the process, determining deviations from targets, reframing problems.