Customer Reviews

Comprehensive text - By: Bobby Elliott, 21 Jan 2004
This book is about assessmentin Higher Education. It provides comprehensive coverage of most aspects of assessment & should be of interest to a wider readership than HE lecturers. It covers: essays, multiple choice, practical work & projects. There's not much information on traditional (i.e. extended response) examinations.

While most of the coverage is pretty routine, the text is particularly strong on project work & self-assessment. Brown provides very useful advice on how to conduct projects & his advocy of self-assessment is convincing & challenging.

The book is also strong on the theory of assessment. His descriptions of reliability & validity are the best treatments of these topics that I've read (he defines five different types of validity).

Although the book was writtenin 1997, most the contents are pretty timeless (such as assessment theory) - but there's no mention of more recent developmentsin this field (such as computer-assisted assessment).

The book is well written & relatively interesting to read -- apart from the frequent ommission of commas which makes fluent reading more difficult than it should be (was this book edited?).