Scenario-Based Assessments: Experience from East Africa

How to assess twenty-first century skills continues to challenge measurement experts in education. Scenario-based assessment, a strategy used in the Assessment of Lifeskills and Values in East Africa (ALiVE) project, offers some benefits for these performance-based skills. In this chapter, scenario-based assessment is defined and described together with a discussion of assumptions made in developing such assessments. The creation of tools for assessing three life skills and the value of respect is used to illustrate issues encountered in the process. The daily life activities of adolescents in home, school and community environments in East Africa provided the substance for stimulus scenarios to which adolescents responded in this large-scale assessment program of more than 45,000 adolescents. The technical processes undertaken by the test development team are described across stages of idea creation, think aloud, and dry run; culminating in a pilot in Kenya in order to generate data for reviewing scale development before the large-scale assessment. Through this process, lessons were learnt that may inform future use of scenario-based assessments in contexts similar to those in which ALiVE operated.