The Practice of Designing Summative Assessment Tasks and Assuring Their Quality in General Secondary Schools

Abstract

The article analyses practical mechanisms for designing unit and term summative assessment tasks in general secondary schools and for assuring their quality. Drawing on J. Biggs’s idea of constructive alignment, G. Wiggins and J. McTighe’s idea of backward design, the taxonomy of educational objectives revised by L. Anderson and D. Krathwohl, and the validity theory of S. Messick and M. Kane, the author substantiates a five-stage quality cycle of summative assessment: clarifying learning outcomes, drawing up the assessment specification, developing tasks and assessment criteria, administration and moderation, and analysis of results and feedback. The key actions, instruments and quality indicators of each stage are summarised in a table; the procedure for calculating item difficulty and discrimination indices is presented, and the factors threatening the validity of assessment are identified. The findings contribute to enhancing teachers’ assessment literacy and ensuring the reliability of summative assessment results.