"In a time when the nation is facing the complexities of participatory democracy at every turn, Testwise: Understanding Educational Assessment is a most welcome touchstone. In her focus on historical and cultural contexts as they reveal the origin and development of assessment principles. Nora Vivian Odendahl has given us a stunning volume. Operating with an insider's knowledge of test development, Dr. Odendahl takes us from civil service examinations used during the Han dynasty in China to contemporary theories of cognition used to map the mind. Always and everywhere, she keeps readers firmly grounded in enduring educational issues: tensions between enforcing accountability and promoting opportunity; the requirements of large-scale testing versus the needs of individual students; and the demands of learning as they intersect with the promise of educational equality. A more timely and valuable book cannot be imagined, and we are fortunate that Dr. Odendahl has given us a way to think critically about the roles of testing in our society."---Norbert Elliot, New Jersey Institute of Technology, author of On a Scale: A Social History of Writing Assessment in America
Testwise: Understanding Educational Assessment offers a 360-degree guided tour of its subject. This comprehensive, two-volume set explores the many different aspects of investigating what students have learned.
To set the scene, volume 1 highlights recurrent themes and the contemporary context. With roots in both academic traditions and the natural sciences, today's achievement testing reaches beyond the classroom to figure in policies aimed at educational reform and societal change. How do the ways in which we assess learning reflect values in our culture? What roles do citizens, educators, government officials, and measurement professionals play?
Against this background, Nora Vivian Odendahl lays out the fundamental principles in assessment. The central chapters of volume 1 explain validity, reliability, fairness, and the language of scores as Odendahl illuminates key challenges and difficult trade-offs associated with matters of technical quality.
In helping the reader understand current issues in testing and the evaluation of actual tests, Testwise puts assessment of learning in a new light: as a process of critical thinking, reasoning from evidence, and defining the goals of education.
Industry Reviews
In a time when the nation is facing the complexities of participatory democracy at every turn, Testwise: Understanding Educational Assessment is a most welcome touchstone. In her focus on historical and cultural contexts as they reveal the origin and development of assessment principles, Nora Vivian Odendahl has given us a stunning volume. Operating with an insider's knowledge of test development, Dr. Odendahl takes us from civil service examinations used during the Han dynasty in China to contemporary theories of cognition used to map the mind. Always and everywhere, she keeping readers firmly grounded in enduring educational questions: tensions between enforcing accountability and promoting opportunity; the requirements of large-scale testing versus the needs of individual students; and the demands of learning as they intersect with promise of educational equality. A more timely and valuable book cannot be imagined, and we are fortunate that Dr. Odendahl has given us a way to think critically about the roles of testing in our society.
