Conferences & Events
Past Conference – 2008
Hissar, Malta
6th-8th November 2008
Theme: Achieving quality in assessment: validity and standards.
Date: 6th-8th November 2008
Workshops: Pre-conference workshops were held on the 5th of November.
Conference Venue: The venue was the Spa Club Central & Spa, a beautiful 5-star hotel conveniently positioned in the centre of the island
Conference flyer: Click the above link to view a PDF of the programme for the 2008 conference in Hissar.
Organisations and individuals working in assessment continually produce, use or research instruments which judge the quality of a process or its final outcome. That process may be the learning outcomes for an individual: what they have learned or the skills that they have. Alternatively, it may be the outcomes for an institution: a school, a programme, or even an education system. For such judgements to be authoritative, the assessment instruments themselves need to have demonstrable quality, but how can this be shown?
The developers of assessments themselves need to have processes that guarantee the quality of the instruments they use and the data they generate. Such a requirement can be through demonstrations of the validity of the inferences drawn from those results, or it can arise through setting and meeting standards. Standards themselves can imply either the setting of desirable levels of behaviour or outcomes, or the extent to which they are achieved.
The theme for the 2008 AEA-Europe conference intended to provide participants with the opportunity:
- to discuss and refine the concept of validity;
- to give demonstrations of the valid use of assessment data;
- to discuss standards for the development of assessments;
- to report on the use of assessments to measure the achievement of standards.
Within this framework, papers were invited which explored all aspects of the quality of educational assessment relevant in Europe, but which also related to the broad areas of validity and standards.