Base It on Theory Posted on February 26, 2006 Peter Mangione (bio) describes three key features of developing an assessment measure.

In my experience a key thing to consider when you're developing a measure is the theoretical and research basis for that measure. Without that, the important parts of assessment, and the kind of assessment I'm going to talk about here is observational assessment, you lose your way. You don't have the guidance you need to do the work because in the three parts of the assessment process, you need that theoretical basis.

Then the next part is interpretation. Once you have that raw piece of data, how are you going to interpret it? If you just have a scoring system that's atheoretical so to speak, you don't gain any information in the interpretation process, but if you have that underlying theory that you're mapping to, you can begin to interpret those observations and start to look at what you're seeing developmentally.

A lot of times you develop an assessment tool, you go collect your data, and then you try to come up with a statistical analysis to understand what you have. That should all be thought through before you ever start what you're doing.

Then the third part of the process is how do you relate it to the wider literature? How do you relate it to the developmental literature? And again, without that conceptual basis underlying your work, you're not going to be able to do it.

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