Validity and reliability are aspects of evaluation that are important when determining how good assessments and tests are. It would be a waste of time to administer exams that are not in alignment with the primary purpose of giving the test in the first place. Furthermore, it is also a total waste of time to administer the same test over and over again if the results do not yield any similarities or if results are not stable or consistent across various groups. The key word here is alignment, so as long as the initial purpose of the test is in alignment with the assessment tool, then one could also be confident that it will elicit accurate results at a much higher degree than if one is not meticulous enough to make sure that all aspects are in alignment.

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The types of validity evidence that are available in order to ensure that the test or assessment actually measures what is supposed to be measure include content validity evidence, criterion-related validity evidence, and construct validity evidence. Content validity evidence is used by “inspecting test questions to see whether they correspond to what the user decides should be covered by the test (pg. 330).” Criterion-related validity evidence attempts to establish if “scores from a test are correlated with an external criterion (pg. 330).” With construct validity evidence, the focus is on determining “if its relationship to other information corresponds well with some theory (pg. 330).” All of these tools are used to ensure that test or assessments are actual measurement devices that measure what it is that supposed to be measured.

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Types of Validity Evidence