ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on qualitative and quantitative approaches to assessment and how district personnel can choose sound measures of both types. It describes two types of qualitative assessments most commonly used to identify students as gifted: performance-based assessments and observations. Two types of quantitative measures are norm-referenced and criterion-referenced measures. The chapter discusses several types of norm-referenced measures: rating scales and achievement, aptitude, and intelligence tests. Reliability is the difference between a person's observed outcome and true outcome in an assessment. This difference is measurement error, the random or unpredictable fluctuations that can occur in assessment outcomes. T. W. Kubiszyn and G. Borich stated that there are several methods to provide evidence that an assessment has sufficient validity, the simplest being content-oriented validity. All assessments should also provide evidence of criterion-related validity and construct validity.
