ACER India was represented at the ITC Conference 2024 in Granada

The ITC Conference in Granada, Spain, earlier this month, focused on innovative research in assessment practices to support effective, valid, and fair testing.

Dr Priyanka Sharma, Director, Research & Assessment, ACER India, presented her work on the methodologies for contextual information in large-scale assessments.

‘While measurement in education is always the talk of everyone, everyone understands its importance; however, it is considered the “least understood” aspect of education,’ she said.

Dr Sharma said one of the recurring discussions in the conference was on building a better understanding of the nature and scope of work in educational measurement for the education community and society at large.

‘Measurement allows us to improve the overall educational process using the resulting analytics. The more precise and detailed the data, the better. However, this statement may not be understood by policy makers, teachers, and the community, who are primarily responsible for improving the overall educational process.’

She said that, for instance, the Wright Map provides a visual representation of the assessment items in a multiple-choice exam by placing the difficulty of the questions on the same measurement scale as the ability of the students who took the test. It is a popular method of checking how easy or difficult the questions are as compared with students’ abilities. However, we need to define the audience for the Wright Map and understand which stakeholders are interested in it.

She also shared another instance of how formative assessments in practice have changed essentially. For example, in some education systems, formative assessments are conducted 3 times a year and constitute 20% of the final score.

Other topics that were discussed in the conference were the need to build a better understanding of evidence from various large-scale regional, national, and international assessments used to evaluate the output of a school system, and levels of student achievement in specific learning domains and the consequent use of data for making systemic changes.

‘These were just a few of the fundamental issues discussed again and again at the ITC Conference in Granada,’ Dr Sharma said. `It was encouraging to witness that on one side, the forum had great researchers and speakers talking about the effective use of AI in testing, innovations in measurement and psychometric modeling, on the other hand, discussions also highlighted the need to widen the lens and perspective of measurement, DEI issues, etc.

‘As explained by Andrew Ho, Professor of Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education and Chair of the National Council on Measurement in Education Taskforce, the report on the foundational competencies in educational measurement is likely to support future development of professionals in educational measurement, and most importantly, it may enhance the use of findings to improve policies, practices and learning,’ she said.

Dr Sharma was also in the international advisory committee of ITC 2024.

To know more about Dr Sharma’s presentation, contact: commsindia@acer.org