Beau Fly Jones

Beau Fly Jones, director of educational programs at the Ohio Supercomputing Center in Columbus, Ohio, discusses the purposes of assessment. Excerpted from the video series Restructuring to Promote Learning in America's Schools, videoconference #4, Multidimensional Assessment: Strategies for the Classroom (North Central Regional Educational Laboratory, 1990).

"The purposes are primarily to get the assessments of the verbal, linguistic and the logical and mathematical kinds of paths that we assign kids in school, but what we want to do is to broaden that and to have the diversity of assessments of students' performances, that's the first point. The second point is that assessments, two to four, have taken up a gigantic amount of time as assessments. Now, another purpose that assessments can serve is to clearly inform and to extend instruction, and to me, that's one of the most exciting aspects of this movement. And the third purpose of assessment, which has rarely been emphasized in the past, certainly not with standardized tests, is to inform the individual of his or her performance, what does it mean to me, how am I doing, and let the individual use that assessment for a self assessment."

This Critical Issue summary was researched and written by Deborah Winking, senior consultant at Panasonic Foundation in Pleasanton, California, and formerly an evaluation associate at North Central Regional Educational Laboratory in Oak Brook, Illinois.

Date posted: 1997