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When should qualitative or quantitative assessments be used?
| “ | Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts. | ” |
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—Albert Einstein |
“Test day,” to most students, means studying, reviewing, and perhaps a bit of cramming to remember as much as possible. But to a teacher, a test gathers important information – does the student really get what I’ve been trying to teach him for the past few weeks? Standardized tests, a big issue in modern education, are certainly not the only kind of test teachers use, and tests aren’t the only way teachers can assess what students have learned. But years before No Child Left Behind, educational researchers at the University of Utah predicted that American educators were going to be “increasingly required to provide evidence” that students are learning what they are supposed to learn. Consequently, teachers now and in the future will have to figure out how to measure whether students have learned the material or not – and just how much of it they’ve learned (Worthen, Borg, and White 1993). Out of this challenge have come many ways to study, classify, and apply different kinds of educational assessment.
Quantitative Assessment
Countless books and articles have been written on the subject of educational measurement, but one way in particular to classify methods of assessment is to categorize them as either quantitative or qualitative.
Quantitative assessment, as the name suggests, focuses on numbers, or quantities. Usually, something that is quantitative can be measured and expressed in units (Wikipedia 2007). For instance, a quantitative test might include multiple-choice questions or fill-in-the-blank questions – these types of questions can easily be classified as “right” or “wrong” and the results tallied to produce a grade. Each right or wrong answer is a unit, and the group of units makes a number that is supposed to show whether or not the student knows the material.
For example:
- Solve 5x + 4 = 24
- What is the name of the capital city of France? (Satterly 1984)
Quantitative tests, like multiple-choice or fill-in-the-blank, are often seen as merely encouraging rote memorization – and they often do. For instance, asking a student, “Which part of speech is used to describe a noun?” from a list of four choices does not necessarily require the student to fully understand adjectives and how to use them. On the other hand, well-constructed questions can measure learning on a variety of levels on Bloom’s Taxonomy, including application and synthesis, if they ask the student to do high-level thinking in order to come up with the best answer (Satterly 1989). A teacher might give the student a sentence and ask him to choose the word that functions as an adjective – giving him the opportunity to apply what he knows to a new situation (Bloom 1984?).
Qualitative Assessment
Qualitative assessment, on the other hand, is not based on numbe