CRITERIA AND VALIDITY

When teachers assess, they have to have in mind that students need to clearly know why they get a grade. The criteria must be easy to understand by the own teacher and students, sometimes it can be holistic, others can be analytic. The first one is useful when a general point of view is needed; the second one is used to see a particular item in a test that must be taken in consideration for further tests or classes.
However, teachers will have to assess under certain rubrics that involve what they want to assess, or their expectations on what students had to write in order to show they learnt the concepts the teacher was teaching them. Rubrics should be as clearest as possible, to prove that students and teachers are clear enough on what they are assessing or being assessed.
The validity of a test is an important part of criteria, it involves everything. It gives credibility to what we think we have to evaluate, even when we have to self-evaluate our criteria or rubrics for a test. Our criteria will be a clear evidence of understanding, including results that can be interpreted as how students are learning, how teachers are assessing, or if the criteria we use, is not contradictory with what we get.

Validity

When we talk about Validity, we state that testing and grading is part of the daily life for students and teachers. The validity of a test will be important, because it defines how much students are learning, and shows how well teachers are doing in class. Testing gives us a statistical score (scoring validity) which is used to produce information that is useful to check what it is measured. It is part of the background that belongs to students. Thus, validity will be important in the learning process because of the respect and commitment that has with showing if the methodological procedures teachers use, are having results when some knowledge must be evaluated, and if it works, there is going to come up reliability through the assessment process.

According to the text, we can find three main arguments to sustain the Validity of an assessment procedure. First, Validity is an instrument to measure, it does so through testing. It measures the performance of a student on specific tasks (quiz, oral exam, mid-terms, etc.). Second, Validity produces data; after measuring we have results that can be used to improve performance on tests in further activities. Finally, Validity is multifaceted; it needs complementary information to show evidences when a test is interpreted, there has to be more and different evidence to consider it, but every Validity will have the same value.