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How to Create and Give Valid Assessments Essay

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Counseling Competency: Assessment

Understanding assessment takes the knowledge of knowing the historical and theoretical bases for assessment techniques, understanding the importance of reliability and validity, what results of assessments mean to a counselor, and the ethical principals of assessment. Assessing a student or client can take on many forms, one example may be a student taking a state test and another example could be observing human behavior. There are important components in developing assessments and important rules to follow to obtain the correct information and not to skew the answers to unfairly label a student or client. In helping a student or client, assessment should be based on what is appropriate to test …show more content…

It is important the test is tailored to the student's ability and all background factors of the student be considered so the test is fair. Lastly, it is important the information from the test be used to help the student in the academic areas of concern so the student can reach their full potential. As a counselor I am responsible to make sure assessments are reliable and valid so the information taken from tests can be used to identify academic strengths or concerns in students and to help teachers to develop realistic goals for their students. Wells and Wollack believe test reliability has two components, the first belief states reliability provides a measure of the extent to which an examinees score reflects random measurement error (Wells and Wollack, 2003). The closest to the whole number 1.0 means the test is reliable, this is important to look at when examining a test because a reliable test will provide the best information needed from students. Wells and Wollack believe the second reason to be concerned with reliability is that it is a precursor to test validity, if test scores cannot be assigned consistently, it is impossible to conclude that the scores accurately measure the domain of interest (Wells and Wollack, 2003). The data from test scores must represent student knowledge and provide accurate information for instruction in the classroom. According to Wainer and Braun, test validity is

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