ABSTRACT
Assessing students’ academic performance, both individual and as a group, is a vital part of the education process and has been a component of education for as long as formal education has been a part of civilization. Academic assessment can be defined as the process of observing and measuring learning. The rationale for evaluating students’ achievement levels is ultimately to improve student learning by monitoring students’ acquisition of knowledge and progress in mastering the curriculum. Academic assessment can take many forms and can be either formative (non-evaluative, designed to monitor student progress, and guide education decisions) or summative (evaluative, used to assign grades or determine if some predetermined criteria has been met). This chapter will discuss purposes of academic assessment and then summarize the characteristics and uses of norm-referenced tests of academic achievement and curriculum-based measures of academic achievement, each of which will also be discussed in more depth in subsequent chapters.
