Affordances of Articulating Assessment Objectives in Research-based Assessment Development

Research-based assessments have historically been developed based on teaching experience and/or course learning goals or objectives. However, using course learning goals for assessment development has limitations, including that the goals for a course are often broad and difficult or impossible to assess with an individualized, scalable assessment instrument. Thus, we propose articulating assessment objectives (AOs), which are concise and specific statements about concepts and practices that an assessment aims to measure, as a productive strategy for assessment development. While similar in many respects to learning goals, AOs are explicitly designed to aid in assessment development in numerous ways, including by helping researchers organize high-level assessment goals, providing an additional means for establishing content validity, operationalizing the goals of the assessment via targeted assessment items, and serving as a way to communicate the substance of an assessment to instructors and researchers interested in using the assessment in their course or research study. Here, we discuss these affordances of AOs in the development of two recent research-based assessments, and we present two detailed examples of AOs and how we progressed from initial assessment concep-tion to AO articulation to finalized assessment items. We conclude by arguing that the articulation of AOs is a valuable step in the development of research-based assessments.