The purpose of assessment is for students to acquire the problem-solving skills and deep understanding to achieve the goal of far transfer to novel domains. This aim stands in stark contrast to traditional classroom tests and standards-based assessments which focus mostly on recognition and recall of course content.
Carver outlines an assessment triangle consisting of:
- an explicit model of both deep understanding and the process of acquiring it
- tasks carefully designed to assess the targeted knowledge together with reliable scoring methods based on the original model and
- a valid process for drawing inferences from performance typically involving triangulation across diverse tasks.
To support instructors and instructional designers in aligning assessment to the goal of deep understanding, Carver points to three intervention case studies published by the Design-Based Research Collective (2003), stating: assessment results can only be interpreted in the context of understanding the teaching/learning processes that actually occurred (i.e. in contrast to the idealized design).
Carver asserts that learning sciences researchers need to determine which data to collect under what conditions as well as which data not to collect (diSessa & Cobb 2004; Kelly 2004).