LEAP assessment

Belongs to LEAP 2.0 > assessment

Working definition
A definition or description of a repeatable method for producing a report, grade, class, level, or other output which is intended to convey information about one or more abilities, qualities or characteristics of an agent, and to enable comparison with similar assessments of similar abilities etc. of other relevantly similar agents.

Explanation
One form of assessment is categorisation. All assessments relate things to patterns, but categorisation is a particular form of assessment where the patterns that things are related to form a defined set.

A common form of assessment in the academic world is to have a process based on an understanding of a shared set of supposed abilities of "candidates", who go through a process (which may involve fixed responses, writing, demonstrating, constructing portfolios, etc.) which are "marked" in some way to produce a number or grade or set of numbers or grades in the end. This may be supplemented one or more written reports.

When a numerical output is produced, there is a temptation to think of this as some form of "measurement", but great caution is needed here, as personal assessment rarely shares any substantial degree of the rigour associated with scientific and technical measurement.

It is possible for assessment simply to be a report on something a learner has done, and at the opposite extreme to presumed "measurement" would be a report which is not useful for distinguishing, selecting or matching people to opportunities.

Neither can one assume that categorisation is reliable for any practical purpose. Whether a category allocated actually corresponds with a desirable outcome for either the assessed or assessing parties needs to be investigated case by case.

What it is not

 * Measurement, in any scientific or technical sense
 * An actual instance of an assessment or evaluation report. That can be done e.g. through an entry, which evaluates what it refers to.

Predicates
See the notes on LEAP triples for an explanation of what forms of triples there are, and how they are represented here.
 * "Direct" predicates are those where this class is in the domain of the predicate (but its superclass is not).
 * "Inverse" predicates, if given for reference, are those where the class is in the range, but not the domain, of the predicate.
 * "=" means the predicate expects a literal object: the type of literal may be specified here.
 * "&rarr;" means the predicate expects an object URL referring to an instance of the given class(es).
 * "&larr;" is used for inverse predicates, and means that triples may exist with instances of the given class(es) as subject and this class as object.

Inherited
from pattern and item
 * content = a definition or specification of the method
 * is pattern of &rarr; normally a LEAP activity or something of the same kind, as assessment is a process
 * relation &rarr; a LEAP ability designed to be assessed in this way

Subclasses
Different kinds of assessment could be defined.

MIAP CDD
Assessment: the overall assessment type seems to be close to this definition, but note that in MIAP CDDs, the actual results are held as "Assessment Result Type". Refer to the Learner Assessment data item group in MIAP CDD for more details.

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Issues
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