6 Approaches to Diagnostic Assessment

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Once you identify and classify a student’s errors, you can attempt to provide instruction to remediate them.

- Strengths: The chief advantage of the error classification approach of the objectives approach is that you discover not only that an objective cannot be performed but also which aspects of the student’s performance are flawed. This approach narrows your search for possible causes of poor performance.

- Weaknesses: Students make many different kinds of errors, and frequently students demonstrate the same error for different reasons, so remedial instruction could be misdirected.

Approach 5: Identifying Student Knowledge Structures

In this approach, a deficit is defined as a student’s inappropriate or incorrect mental organization of concepts and their interrelationships. Several methods are used to assess students’ knowledge structures. These methods share the common perspective that as individuals become more proficient, their knowledge becomes more interconnected, more deeply organized, and more accessible.

Concept mapping – a graphic way to represent how a student understands the relationships among the major concepts in the subject.

For concept mapping, the teacher shows a student the list of concepts and works with the student individually, following the procedure to create the concept map. (Figure 7.4)

- Strengths: This diagnostic approach focuses our attention on how a student thinks about the concepts and their interrelationships. It gives you some insight into how the student sees the concepts organized and, perhaps, how they might be related to other concepts and procedures a student has learned.

- Weaknesses: These procedures are experimental. The way a student reacts to the teacher and the interviewing situation may drastically affect the results.

Approach 6: Identifying Competencies for Solving Word Problems

In this approach, a deficit is defined as a student’s inability to perform one or more of the components necessary to solve a word problem. Solving word problems comprises a significant number of learning outcomes in social students, mathematics, and science.

- Strengths: This approach is most appropriate when you have word problems that are solved by applying a formula or a set of arithmetic operations in an algorithm. The framework you use to interpret the diagnosis (linguistic, schematic, strategic, and algorithmic knowledge) can be applied consistently across any categories of problems.

- Weaknesses: This approach requires many items per knowledge category to ensure sufficient reliability. The procedure is time consuming. The validity of the approach also depends heavily on how well you are able to identify key phrases, appropriate schemata, and appropriate strategies for solving the problems.

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