The issue of developing better education systems that promote both quality of education and high achievements among students continues to be discussed among educators and policy makers. One of the strategies used to achieve this goal is to develop variety of standardized assessments that will allow law-makers to track the learning and achievements of students and educators. Although by using these assessments educators can get clear information about their students' achievements, the results do not describe the learning processes students have undergone, nor can these assessments explain the differences among students or the differences between one year and another (Jochim & McGuinn, 2016).
Long before standardized national and international assessments were developed, testing was conducted by all teachers to allow monitoring of their students’ achievements in each subject, and every teacher could develop the test independently. Nowadays, from pre-school to university, students are assessed at certain times according to specific academic criteria, in order to allow equal evaluation for all (Blendea, 2016). However, using equal criteria for all prevents proper inclusion processes for students from different cultures or with special needs, as they need to be assessed differently. Blendea also suggests that assessors should clarify and define the main focus of the assessment before they begin the process. Do educational leaders wish to look at the macro-issues of education and focus on the social impact of education? For that goal they need to use external assessments that evaluate the educational system. Or, do educational leaders wish to learn more about the micro-issues and use internal assessments that follow specific performances of students and teachers?
Nowadays there are three main approaches toward assessments of learning and school systems: standardized closed assessment, standardized dynamic assessment and alternative assessment. While all assessors focus on the goal of knowing the characteristics of a certain education system at a certain period, each type of assessment provides a different type of information.
Within education systems, standardized assessments are developed to assess the achievement of goals defined by law-makers, curricula-writers, or other educational leaders. These assessments are given to all students and teachers, with no adaptation to the differentiation among the students. The structure, timeline, and grade-scale of the standardized assessments are known ahead of time in order to allow comparison between all students (Kendi, 2016). Therefore, using standardized assessment is ineffective when the goal is to improve the quality of education in general.
Dynamic assessments were developed from the understanding that the goal of the assessments is to monitor a learning processes rather than its results (Kozulin, 2014). From this perspective, the assessment processes take longer and the focus is on the learners and how each of them developed. While assessing school systems, like with learners, dynamic assessments allow understanding processes of change and thus how to continue promoting these changes.
Alternative assessments, unlike the standardized or the dynamic ones, are usually developed by educational leaders who work at a specific school that finds other assessments to be inefficient in tracking the goals they have defined. Therefore, it is up to teachers at that school to know how to develop the necessary assessments that will provide useful results (Kozminsky, 2003; Olson, Roberts & Leko, 2014).
