Fair measures

Last week I wrote about the issues and challenges of assessment. There are many. One is to understand that measuring is not the same as providing good feedback. Yesterday at the London Grid for learning Conference I asked my audience of over 400 teachers if they knew what ipsative assessment was. One teacher raised their hand. This is a standard response. Ipsative assessment is not a commonly known method, and yet most of us use it just about every day to measure ourselves. Here's what Wikipedia says (and it's accurate):

In education, ipsative assessment is the practice of assessing present performance against the prior performance of the person being assessed. One place where this might be implemented is in reference to tests used with K-12 students in the United States, where teacher performance is currently popular. 

Ipsative assessment is used in everyday life, and features heavily in physical education and also in computer games. Encouraging pupils to beat their previous scores can take peer pressure out of situations and eliminates the competitive element associated with norm-based referencing. It can be particularly useful for children with learning disabilities and can improve motivation.

Let me expand on this. In games playing, children (and adults) are often in a battle with themselves. Gamers are constantly obsessed with trying to better their own scores. Ask an avid gamer what level he has achieved on XIII or Call of Duty and they won't hesitate to tell you. When you go to the gym or out for a run - and especially if you are training for a marathon or competition of some kind - you become very focused on your times and you strive to improve them. Teachers of physical education use ipsative assessment regularly with their students, to motivate them to become faster, higher, stronger, more skillful. It's the ethos behind the spirit of the Olympic Games. You participate to better yourself and winning is the icing on the cake. Children play games and sport all the time. They are fascinated by how far they can go and how many points they can score. It's a natural part of their every day experience.

Here's John Kleeman on the benefits of ipsative assessment:

.... an advantage of ipsative assessment is that it measures progress and development – a test-taker can see if he or she is improving and whether or not he/she is taking advantage of feedback from previous assessments. Using ipsative assessment can help all test-takers improve: A weaker performer will be encouraged by seeing performance improvements over earlier attempts, and a stronger performer can be challenged to do better. This can deal with the risks of the weaker performer becoming demotivated from a poor test result and the strong performer complacent from a good one. Ipsative assessment can be used for objective measures (e.g. did I get a better score?) and also for more subjective measures (e.g. am I more confident about something?)

From my professional experience, I would argue that Ipsative assessment is by far the fairest, and most relevant form of assessment there is. Students are competing against themselves, and only themselves. Imagine what might happen if, instead of measuring children's maths or science knowledge against some arbitrary benchmark (criterion referencing), we assessed them on how well they had personally progressed against their previous attainment levels. We might have ourselves a fairer assessment system for learning. Will it happen? Criterion referenced assessment is deeply ingrained within the fabric of the school system in most countries now. Whether we can effectively replace our current system of assessment with ipsative assessment is another question entirely.

If it happened, it would be a seismic shift in education.

Photo by Areta Ekarafi on Flickr


Fair measures by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.