Cognitive Psychology and Assessment Practices

Introduction

An assessment is a tool designed to observe a person's behaviour and produce data that can be used to draw inferences concerning some characteristic of that person, such as what the person knows, or feels, or believes (the ‘construct’). This process of reasoning from evidence [Page 245](i.e. the data) can be portrayed as an assessment triangle. As shown in Figure 1, the vertices of the triangle represent the three key elements underlying any assessment: (a) a model of the person construct; (b) a set of beliefs about the kinds of observations that will provide evidence about the construct; and (c) an interpretation process for making sense of the evidence (NRC, 2001). An assessment cannot be designed and implemented without some consideration of each of these ...