Assessment can sometimes feel like a tedious chore. Teaching should be about inspiring young minds, not driving them through a series of stultifying tests. And when assessment is done badly, it can get in the way of good teaching, and even distort it. But done well, assessment can give pupils better information about their performance and teachers better information about whether their methods are working. Assessment is just a type of measurement, and we know from other walks of life that accurate measurement can be transformative: improvements in measurement brought about by microscopes and stethoscopes in the 19th century led to improvements in healthcare itself, while improvements in how we measure time led to improvements in navigation and ultimately helped to support the development of satellite navigation systems. Two vital concepts for understanding assessment are validity and reliability, and the rest of this article will give a brief introduction to both. Perhaps the most i
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