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AFFECT DESCRIBES A MEDLEY OF NONCOGNITIVE VARIABLES SUCH AS A PERSON’S

attitudes, interests, and values. To educators, student affect is terribly

important. If teachers can help their students acquire positive atti-

tudes toward learning or can help their students derive more satisfac-

tion from reading, then those teachers will have done something

wonderful. Indeed, if I were pushed to register a preference for either

affective or cognitive outcomes, I’d definitely opt for affect.

The reasons are simple: Children who love learning will keep on

learning. Children who enjoy reading will keep on reading even

when they aren’t “required” to read. On the flip side, think about

math teachers who get their students to be super-skilled in math and

yet, in the process, lead a number of those students to detest all

things mathematical. I would not regard such teachers as successful.

A teacher who quashes students’ positive regard for learning is doing

something awful.

Why Assess Affect? The first reason that I believe educators should be interested in assess-

ing affective variables is because those variables are excellent predic-

tors of students’ future behavior. For example, if students learn to

8 The Value of Affective Assessment

1 0 6

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Popham, W. James. Test Better, Teach Better : The Instructional Role of Assessment, Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/amridge/detail.action?docID=5704436. Created from amridge on 2022-01-20 14:34:43.

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enjoy giving speeches while they’re in school, chances are that they

will be better at public speaking later in life, going on to communi-

cate well in work environments, in community politics, and as mem-

bers of their children’s parent-teacher associations.

The relationship between assessments of affective variables as pre-

dictors of students’ subsequent behaviors and those subsequent

behaviors is depicted graphically in Figure 8.1. This predictive rela-

tionship is rooted in probabilities. Suppose there were 100 high

school seniors who, as measured by affective assessments, displayed

really positive attitudes toward school and, in particular, toward the

act of learning itself. Then suppose there were 100 high school sen-

iors whose affective assessments showed that they hated school and

found repugnant anything even mildly linked to learning. Now, in

which of the two groups would you expect to find a higher percent-

age of high schoolers enrolling in some form of post-secondary edu-

cation? On average, of course, far more of the school-lovers would

hop on the post-secondary bus than would their school-hating

counterparts.

can be highly predictive of

8 . 1 THE PREDICTIVE NATURE OF STUDENTS’ IN-SCHOOL ASSESSED AFFECT

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Given that most teachers really do care about their students’ suc-

cess in subsequent grade levels and in life thereafter, they can pick up

some awfully important insights about their students’ future behav-

iors by employing a bit of affective assessment. Think for a moment

about children who dislike school or, more specifically, dislike read-

ing (because of boredom, low skill levels, and so on). These children

are not likely to read on their own and are likely to go on disliking

and avoiding reading in future years. Don’t teachers have a profes-

sional obligation not only to try to reinforce and enhance positive

attitudes, but also to intervene to change negative ones?

Another reason teachers should assess affect is to simply remind

themselves that there’s more to being a successful teacher than help-

ing students obtain high scores on achievement tests. It has been said

that “we measure what we treasure,” and it’s true. If you set aside

classroom time to assess certain attitudes, interests, or values your

students possess, you are asserting these things are important—

important enough to be worthy of promotion and the targets of

instructional attention. The simple act of assessing student affect,

especially at the beginning of the school year and at its conclusion,

can remind you how critical these components are to a good educa-

tion and increase the odds that you will devote greater instructional

attention to the affect you believe matters most.

There is another dividend when teachers devise affective assess-

ments for their students. Much as the creating and examining of con-

ventional assessments helps to clarify cognitive curricular intentions

and clarify appropriate means to those ends, the creating and exam-

ining of affective assessments can help teachers identify the hall-

marks of particular affective targets. (Let’s face it, “Students will learn

to love learning” is about as fuzzy as a goal can get!) Such assessment-

induced clarification can give teachers useful ideas about how to pro-

mote those outcomes.

Finally, information regarding students’ affect can help teachers

teach more effectively on a day-to-day basis. Most obviously, if you

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discover through affective assessment that your students are really

bored and disinterested in the content you’re presenting or plan to

present, then you can do something to address that problem in

tomorrow’s lesson.

Which Affect Should Teachers Assess? Before going much further into the assessment of affect, let me

emphasize that teachers need to make sure that any affective vari-

ables they assess or attempt to promote instructionally should be non-

controversial attitudes, interests, and values. Many parents are under-

standably wary of schools’ intruding on matters they believe should

be dealt with within the family. Lots of parents would properly take

umbrage if a teacher attempted to influence students’ values regard-

ing such issues as abortion or the appropriateness of various lifestyle

choices. Here’s an easy-to-remember guideline: Steer clear of any affec-

tive variable that would fail to secure endorsement from nearly everyone.

Still, there are plenty of powerful and noncontroversial affective

variables to which teachers can attend:

• Possible attitude targets include positive attitudes toward learn-

ing, positive attitudes toward self, and positive attitudes toward those

who differ from ourselves.

• Possible interest targets include interest in specific school sub-

jects, interest in public affairs, and interest in altruistic endeavors.

• Possible value targets include honesty, integrity, and justice.

How to Measure Affect: The Self-Report Inventory Although there are a number of exotic assessment approaches teachers

can take to get a fix on students’ attitudes, values, and interests

(including surreptitious observation and the use of accomplices), the

most straightforward, cost-effective way to measure affect in the class-

room is to rely on students’ anonymous responses to self-report inven-

tories. (“Inventory,” by the way, is just a fancy label for almost any sort

of self-report instrument. If you prefer to use such essentially

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equivalent synonyms as “survey,” “questionnaire,” or “report,” you’re

certainly welcome to do so.) In their excellent book about affective

assessment, Anderson and Bourke (2000) provide a persuasive argu-

ment that, in the real world of schooling, students’ affect ought to be

measured exclusively through self-report inventories. If you’re inter-

ested in seeing how they arrive at this conclusion about the merits of

self-report assessment, you might want to look at Chapter 3 in their

very readable book.

Always Ensure Anonymity To place any confidence in students’ responses to self-report invento-

ries, however, it is imperative that students supply those responses

anonymously. Moreover, it is necessary for students to truly believe

that their responses cannot be traced. Students who suspect other-

wise are more apt to make socially desirable responses—responses

they believe adults would want them to make. If you hope to collect

evidence that will support valid inferences about your students’ true

attitudes, interests, and values, then anonymity is the only way to go.

Here are several anonymity-enhancement tactics that should

help you collect the honest answers you’re looking for.

▲ Stress anonymity in the self-report directions. Tell your

students not to put their names on their inventories. Emphasize that

you will not be tracing responses back to the originators and that

there are no right or wrong answers. Include these directions on the

printed self-report inventories.

▲ Explain the assessment’s rationale. Make it clear to your

students that the purpose of this collection of self-report information

is to help you improve your instruction. You are not interested in

evaluating them as individuals or as a group.

▲ Restrict responses to marks. Tell your students (orally and

in the self-report inventory’s written directions) that they must make

their responses using only checkmarks or X-marks, not words or sen-

tences. If you want to secure anonymous written comments from your

students, provide a different response form and collect it separately.

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Remember, you are attempting to enhance students’ perception of

true anonymity, and students tend to think that hand-written com-

ments are not only potentially traceable, but apt to be traced.

Separate written comments present a far “safer” alternative.

▲ Provide for anonymous collection. Direct your students

to place their completed inventories in a collection box or have a stu-

dent (not one of your “favorite” students) collect the completed

inventories. Describe your planned collection procedure to students

before they begin to respond to the inventory.

▲ Give students space. While your students are filling out

their affective inventories, refrain from “hovering” so close to them

that students think you might be able to see how they are respond-

ing. This is a great time for teachers to engage in blissfully restful at-

desk sitting.

Always Make Group-Focused Inferences Only Given the anonymity of these self-report inventories, you may be

wondering how you could ever get a fix on an individual student’s

affective status. Well, the answer’s simple: You can’t.

In any group of 25–30 students responding to an anonymous self-

report affective inventory, there will be a few students who respond

too positively and a few who respond too negatively. The teacher’s

only recourse is to focus on the group’s average response, allowing the

too-positive and too-negative responses to cancel each other. All

affective inferences, therefore, must be group-focused inferences. Based

on self-report inventories, a teacher can conclude with reasonable

accuracy how confident a group of students are in their oral commu-

nication skills. But that teacher cannot conclude anything about

Maria’s confidence in being able to give oral reports, because the risk

of that conclusion’s invalidity is just too high. Despite understand-

able temptation to do so, affective inferences should never be indi-

vidually focused.

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As another example, based on students’ anonymous responses to

a self-report affective inventory administered at the beginning of the

school year, a teacher might conclude that, “My students appear to be

really interested in social studies as a content area, but are quite nega-

tive about science.” It is these sorts of group-focused inferences that

you’ll be getting from affective assessments. The purpose of coming up

with those sorts of inferences is to help you do a better job of teach-

ing—to help you identify areas of student affect that, based on your

students’ affective status, you may wish to address instructionally.

Building Affective Inventories for Your Classroom There are three kinds of affective self-report inventories that teachers

can use in their own classrooms: (1) Likert inventories, (2) Likert-like

multidimensional inventories, and (3) confidence inventories. Two of the

three are particularly suitable for most teachers’ needs. Let’s take a

closer look.

Likert Inventories The best known and most widely used kind of affective inventory is

the Likert inventory, a self-report instrument named after its inven-

tor, who came up with the measurement approach in the early 1930s.

Most of us have completed at least a few Likert inventories. The for-

mat presents a series of statements (items) to which individuals regis-

ter the degree of agreement they have for each statement, most com-

monly “Strongly Agree,” “Agree,” “Uncertain,” “Disagree,” and

“Strongly Disagree.” Respondents might also be asked to register their

agreements in other ways such as “True for me,” “Not true for me,”

“Unsure,” and so on. Likert inventories for young children usually

contain only two or three simple response-options such as “Yes,”

“No,” or “Not Sure.” Inventories for older children usually provide

four or five response-options per item.

The critical feature of Likert inventories is that they are “unidi-

mensional,” meaning that all the statements in a given inventory are

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designed to collect evidence focused on a single affective variable.

Examples of a single affective variable might be attitudes toward indi-

viduals from ethnic groups other than one’s own, interest in scientif-

ic phenomena, and valuing of democratic approaches to govern-

ment. In a typical Likert inventory, you might find 20–30 statements,

some reflecting positive responses toward the affective variable being

measured and some reflecting negative responses. Figure 8.2 shows

an excerpt from a 20-item affective assessment instrument aimed at

measuring middle school students’ attitudes toward public service or,

more specifically, their attitudes toward serving as an elected member

of government.

Notice that some of the statements in the Figure 8.2 inventory

reflect positive attitudes toward serving in public office and some of

the statements represent the opposite. If students were really enthu-

siastic about seeking elected political office, they would tend to agree

with the positive statements and disagree with the negative

statements.

To score an inventory like this, you’d assign three points for every

agreement with a positive statement or for any disagreement with a

negative statement. You’d give two points for any “Uncertain”

response. You’d give one point for every disagreement with a positive

statement or for any agreement with a negative statement. Scores,

then, could range between 60 and 20 for the full 20-item inventory.

Higher scores would represent students’ more positive attitudes

toward serving as an elected public servant.

I like Likert inventories a lot, and I’ve used them often through-

out my career. When teaching a course about educational assessment,

I often used some sort of Likert inventory to assess my students’ com-

fort in dealing with assessment-related concepts. Likert inventories

have the additional advantage of being relatively easy to construct.

However, remember that the characteristic “unidimensionality” of

Likert inventories means that they measure only single affective vari-

ables. In reality, most teachers are likely to be interested in several

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affective variables. For this reason, I think that the creation and use

of full-blown, 25-item Likert inventories dealing with a single affec-

tive variable usually represents assessment overkill in the classroom

environment.

8 . 2 A LIKERT INVENTORY EXCERPT

MY ATTITUDES TOWARD ELECTIVE OFFICE

Directions: Presented below are 20 statements dealing with public service. Please read each statement, then indicate whether you agree with that statement, disagree with it, or are uncertain by checking one of the three response boxes for the state- ment. An example is provided below.

Agree Uncertain Disagree

I like to eat large breakfasts. ■■ ■■ ■■

(In this example, the person did not like large breakfasts, so checked “Disagree.”)

There are no correct or incorrect answers, so please answer honestly. Do not write your name on this inventory. Your responses will be totally anonymous.

Statements Your Responses

Agree Uncertain Disagree

1. Most politicians are dishonest. ■■ ■■ ■■

2. I would like to be a U.S. senator. ■■ ■■ ■■

3. Without elected legislators, our society fails. ■■ ■■ ■■

4. I hope my friends don’t enter politics. ■■ ■■ ■■

5. Today’s politicians shape tomorrow’s world. ■■ ■■ ■■

19. I will never run for a political office. ■■ ■■ ■■

20. Democracy loses without elected officials. ■■ ■■ ■■

✔

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Multidimensional Inventories What you’re looking for when you assess your students’ affect is an

approximate idea about your students’ attitudes, interests, or values.

Given the need for only approximations of a student group’s affective

status, I recommend the use of multidimensional inventories. These

inventories look like Likert inventories, for they ask students to regis-

ter degrees of agreement with a series of statements. But unlike Likert-

inventories, the statements in multidimensional inventories often

deal with a considerable number of different affective variables.

Consider Figure 8.3, and I’ll show you what I mean.

The inventory in this figure is intended for students in grades 4–6

and designed to measure seven variables that might interest a class-

room teacher, including attitude toward school, attitude toward mak-

ing oral presentations, and interest in science. Each of those affective

variables is measured by two statements, one of which is stated posi-

tively and one of which is stated negatively. For example, compare

Statement 1 with Statement 14, and Statement 2 with Statement 8.

Based on what we know about content sampling, I realize that it’s

pretty difficult to place enormous confidence in the results of any

sort of two-item assessment. Remember, though, that the goal is to

come up with a valid inference about the affective status of the whole

class. What we’re really talking about is a two-item assessment multi-

plied by the number of students who respond—30 items for a class of

15, for example, 40 items for a class of 20, and so on. If the affective

inventory’s items are thoughtfully developed, teachers can gain a suf-

ficiently accurate picture regarding the affective status of their stu-

dents as a group.

If you construct your own multidimensional affective invento-

ries, remember that each variable you want to measure must be rep-

resented by two items, one positive and one negative. Moreover, be

sure to phrase your inventory statements so that they are moderate-

ly positive and moderately negative. This lukewarm approach is nec-

essary to elicit the varied responses that you need to make a two-item

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8 . 3 A LIKERT-LIKE MULTIDIMENSIONAL INVENTORY

School and Me: An Affective Inventory

Directions: Please indicate how true or untrue the statements in this inventory are for you. Some of the statements are positive; some are negative. Decide if each statement is true for you. There are no right or wrong answers. Please answer hon- estly. Do not write your name on this inventory. Only make X marks. An example is provided below.

Statement

I enjoy going to the movies.

Response (on per statement)

Very true for me.

Not true for me.

I’m not sure.

When you are finished, a student will collect your inventory and place it (and all other completed inventories) in an envelope that we will seal and take directly to the princi- pal's office. Thank you for your help.

Statements Your Responses

1. Most of the time, I really like school.

2. I often like to learn about scientific things.

3. I can usually write good reports and stories.

4. I don't like to read.

5. I don't like to give oral reports in class.

6. I think that doing mathematics is fun.

7. I like it when we learn about social studies.

8. I don't want to be a scientist when I'm older.

9. I really don't like to write very much.

10. I like to read books when I have time to do it.

11. I enjoy speaking in front of other students.

12. I dislike doing mathematics problems.

13. When we do social studies, I don't like it.

14. Overall, I really don't enjoy school all that much.

Very true for me.

Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q

Not true for me.

Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q

I’m not sure.

Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q

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assessment pay off. For instance, Statement 1 in Figure 8.3 says,

“Most of the time, I really like school.” I’d call that statement mod-

erately positive, wouldn’t you? It would be likely to elicit different

levels of agreement. Now imagine that statement had read “I adore

school every single minute of every school day.” No sane student

could honestly say that such a super-positive statement was “Very

true for me.” Super-negative statements are similarly ineffective.

Scoring procedures for multidimensional inventories are pretty

much the same as for unidimensional Likert inventories (score nega-

tive responses low, positive responses high) with the obvious adjust-

ment that you need to compute a two-item score for each affective

variable assessed. Thus, assigning each item a three-point, two-point,

or one-point value, the highest score for any two-item assessment

would be six points, and the lowest score would be two points.

Confidence Inventories The final kind of affective assessment device that I want you to con-

sider is called a confidence inventory. It describes various sorts of activ-

ities a student might be asked to engage in, and then it asks students

to identify their confidence level if they were personally required to

carry out each such activity. As with other types of classroom affec-

tive assessments, a confidence inventory’s purpose is to provide

teachers with insights that can help them make better instructional

decisions.

Let’s pause for a moment to consider the relationship between a

student’s expressed confidence in being able to do something and

that student’s actual competence. In general, the more competence

someone possesses in being able to do something, the more confi-

dence that person will have in his or her ability to do it. Of course,

there will obviously be exceptions: competent students who lack con-

fidence and incompetent students who ooze confidence. But it’s like-

ly that students’ confidence regarding Skill X will be positively relat-

ed to their competence regarding Skill X.

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You doubtlessly recognize that for certain of the cognitive skills

you routinely promote in your classroom, the difficulties of carrying

out a full-blown assessment may sometimes be substantial. Think

about how difficult it is to get an accurate measurement of your stu-

dents’ skill in collaborative, small-group problem solving. Coming up

with suitable assessments of a complex skill like this can be a genuine

pain. These are the situations in which confidence inventories can be

really valuable, as they can serve as proxies for students’ actual, hard-

to-measure skills. Remember, though, as for all affective assessments,

your inventory-based inferences must focus on your entire class, not

on individual students.

Figure 8.4 shows an illustrative confidence inventory intended

for upper-grade elementary students. As this inventory deals exclu-

sively with language arts, we will assume that the fictional teacher

who developed it was chiefly interested in students’ confidence

regarding their oral and written communication skills. Notice that all

the activities in the inventory are things that students might become

more confident about doing over time, provided that their teacher’s

instruction successfully boosted their oral and written communica-

tion skills. Clearly, if you would like to use this sort of inventory in

your own classroom, you would need to select activities specifically

related to your own instructional concerns.

Notice that this particular confidence inventory includes four

possible responses for each of the activities. There could be more

response-options or fewer, just as long as the scorer assigns higher

point values to the more-confident responses. So, for example, award-

ing points on a 4-3-2-1 basis, the highest overall score a student could

make on this particular 10-item inventory would be 40. If the teacher

using this inventory was interested in computing a separate score for

oral communication skills (addressed in Items 1, 3, 4, 6, and 9) and

written communication skills (addressed in Items 2, 5, 7, 8, and 10),

it could be easily done.

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Language Arts Confidence Inventory

Directions: This inventory was designed to inform your teacher about the confi- dence that you and your classmates have in speaking and writing. Its purpose is to help your teacher do a better job. Below, there are 10 statements describing par- ticular activities. Please look at each activity and then imagine that you had to carry out that activity. For each activity, indicate the level of confidence you would have in your ability to do it. Circle only one response for each activity. An example is provided below.

VC = Very Confident LC = A Little Confident FC = Fairly Confident NC = Not Confident at All

Activities

Suppose you were asked to . . .

Operate a film projector in a theater.

Your Response

Activities

Suppose you were asked to . . .

1. write a friendly letter to an English-speaking but unknown student in another country.

2. give a 5-minute speech to your classmates about a recent vacation.

3. compose an original narrative essay of 500–700 words.

4. compose an original persuasive essay of 500–700 words.

5. explain to a classmate how an oral report should be organized.

6. use a computer to compose a short written report.

7. answer a teacher's question aloud in class when you know the answer.

8. disagree aloud, politely but firmly, with a class- mate about an issue that the class is studying.

9. write a short essay of 500 words with no errors in spelling, punctuation, or usage.

10. give a two-minute impromptu speech in front of the class, without any preparation.

Your Response

How confident would you be?

Do not write your name on this inventory. There are no “right” or “wrong” answers. Please respond honestly.

How confident would you be?

VC FC LC NC

Thank you for completing this confidence inventory.

8 . 4 A CONFIDENCE INVENTORY

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For purposes of instructional decision making, the most useful

scoring approach is often a per-item average for the entire class.

That’s because each of the activities in the inventory describes a task

that you could teach your students how to tackle. Students’ respons-

es to content-focused confidence inventories can also help teachers

decide how much time they should devote to teaching to such con-

tent. A teacher might choose to devote less instructional time to skills

and knowledge in which students expressed great confidence and

more instructional time to skills and knowledge about which stu-

dents were less confident.

Finally, of course, pre-assessment/postassessment comparisons of

per-item class averages from confidence inventories can be extremely

illuminating to teachers trying to get a handle on how well they are

teaching. An increase in students’ perceptions of their abilities from

the start of the school year to its conclusion can really reflect favor-

ably on a teacher’s instruction. In Chapter 11, we’ll go into this in

more detail.

I really hope that you give affective assessment a try in your own

classroom. Your students will benefit now and in the years to come.

INSTRUCTIONALLY FOCUSED TESTING TIPS

• Give serious consideration to the assessment of student affect in

your own classroom.

• Measure—and deal instructionally—only with noncontroversial

attitudes, interests, or values.

• Assess your students’ affect using anonymous, self-report

inventories.

• Focus all assessment-based inferences regarding students’

affect on groups, not individual students.

• Recognize that the assessment of affect will typically sensitize

you to the importance of giving instructional attention to stu-

dents’ affect.

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T h e V a l u e o f A f f e c t i v e A s s e s s m e n t 1 2 1

Recommended Resources

Anderson, L. W., & Bourke, S. F. (2000). Assessing affective characteristics in the schools (2nd ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Kohn, A. (1997, February). How not to teach values: A critical look at charac- ter education. Phi Delta Kappan, 78(6), 428–439.

Popham, W. J. (2000). Modern educational measurement: Practical guidelines for educational leaders (3rd ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Popham, W. J. (2002). Classroom assessment: What teachers need to know (3rd ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Popham, W. J. (Program Consultant). (1997). Assessing student attitudes: A key to increasing achievement [Videotape]. Los Angeles: IOX Assessment Associates.

Popham, W. J. (Program Consultant). (1997). Improving instruction: Start with student attitudes [Videotape]. Los Angeles: IOX Assessment Associates.

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