Skip to main content icon/video/no-internet
icon backReturn to Entries

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 (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 three elements. The three are represented as vertices of a triangle because each is connected to and dependent on the other two. Thus, for an assessment to be effective, the three elements must be in synchrony. The assessment triangle provides a useful framework for analysing current assessments or designing future assessments.

None

Figure 1. The assessment triangle.

Given this framework then, the essential relationship between cognitive psychology and assessment is that, for many of the constructs that we wish to assess, the source of that construct will be a theory from the area of cognitive psychology. Moreover, the research that was the basis for that theory will oftentimes include instrument development that will also be the basis for the design of the assessment items. Unfortunately, there are constructs of a cognitive nature that one might like to assess that have not been thoroughly investigated within cognitive psychology. In that case, the assessment instrument developer must take on the role of cognitive psychologist as part of instrument development.

The following paragraphs are structured as: (a) a survey of recent advances in cognitive psychology, (b) commentary on their relevance to assessment, (c) a discussion of the situative perspective on cognitive psychology and its implications for assessment, and finally (d), as a conclusion, a discussion of future perspectives.

The Cognitive Perspective

The theories of cognitive psychology are built up to explain how people develop knowledge structures, such as the ideas associated with a certain domain of knowledge or a subject matter discipline, and ways of reasoning and problem-solving. The discipline of cognitive psychology seeks to understand how knowledge is encoded, stored, organized, and retrieved, and how different types of internal representations are created as people learn about a concept (NRC, 1999). One major principle of cognitive theory is that learners actively construct their understanding by trying to connect new data with their existing knowledge.

To cognitive psychologists, knowing is not merely the accumulation of factual information and routine procedures. Knowing means being able to combine knowledge, skills, and procedures in ways that are useful for interpreting new situations and solving problems. Thus, assessment of cognitive constructs should not overemphasize basic information and skills – these should be seen as resources for more meaningful activities. As Wiggins (1989) points out, children learn a sport not just by practising the component skills (e.g. in soccer, dribbling, passing, and shooting), but also by actually playing the sport.

...

  • Loading...
locked icon

Sign in to access this content

Get a 30 day FREE TRIAL

  • Watch videos from a variety of sources bringing classroom topics to life
  • Read modern, diverse business cases
  • Explore hundreds of books and reference titles

Read next

More like this

Sage Recommends

We found other relevant content for you on other Sage platforms.

close

Have you created a personal profile? Login or create a profile so that you can save clips, playlists and searches

close
close
close Signed In to profile You are signed in as:
close
Logged in Institution Institution