5 methods to use when planning your assessments

In my previous article, I gave an overview of the six authoring steps that can help you achieve trustable assessment results. Each step contributes to the next and useful analysis of results is only possible if all six steps are done effectively.
Now, let’s dig into step 1 of the authoring process: planning the assessment. There are five methods you can use to plan your assessments for trustable results. Questionmark offers you the technology to do each of these five methods covered below.

1. To determine what the test should cover you can use job task analysis surveys to make sure you assess the right competencies. This will help analyze what tasks within a job role are most important and are key to discover what topics need to be covered in an assessment. Questionmark technology offers a JTA question type and provides JTA reports to help you run JTAs easily and effectively and get useful data to use in your assessment design.
2. Once the JTA has been completed, you can determine the topics that an assessment needs to cover. Using an assessment management system with an item bank that structures items by hierarchical topics is hugely beneficial and makes it easy to manage and view all items and assessments under development.
3. Indexing or metatagging items by specific job tasks, knowledge, skills and abilities can be useful in planning assessments to allow for more flexible management of items and selection within the appropriate assessments.
4. Protecting against content theft is an important part of the planning of items and assessments because if item or assessment content is leaked out during the assessment construction process, it will reduce the assessment’s validity. Having secure access to items and assessments is essential. Individual logons protected by strong passwords and good policies and culture within your team can help prevent this.
5. Planning for assessing someone’s competence in the language they are most comfortable in is an important part of the assessment planning process. Planning for translation management for managing translation and multilingual delivery capabilities is an important part of planning your assessments if you need multilingual assessments for your participants.