Use Cases For Assessments

What You’ll Learn

By the end of this lesson, you’ll be able to:

• Understand what an assessment is and differentiate it with a Quiz.
• Identify various use cases of assessments from Self Assessment, Mental Health Assessment to Drug Assessment.
• Identify the type of questions usually asked in different assessment use cases.

1. What is Assessment?

One may experience a slight difficulty in finding the line of distinction between assessment and quiz.

Assessments are great tools for assessing yourself and others on a particular subject or situation. Assessments give you more holistic results.

On the contrary, quizzes are short questionnaires that may not give a holistic view of your understanding of a particular subject. Quiz use case will be discussed in the next lesson.

Many assessment scales have been discovered over the years. They were administered as pen-and-paper assessments before. But now, all assessments are moving to digital with the wide adoption of internet technologies.

A few assessment use cases are listed below.

• Self Assessments
• Mental Health Assessments
• Skill Assessments
• Learning Assessments
• Drug Assessments

This lesson will help you understand each of the above assessment use cases.

2. Self Assessments

Self-assessments help you to assess yourself without the help of anyone.

These assessments are mostly measured across pre-determined scales and help you identify strengths and weaknesses.

You can assess yourself with an assessment scale, where each spectrum in the scale gives feedback.

Are you eating healthy?

Healthy eating assessment helps you to evaluate your diet and nutrition habits. Healthy eating means mindful and balanced eating.

Below are a few questions that can be asked in a Healthy Eating Assessment.

• How many times a day do you eat packaged snacks?
• How many packages of dry fruit do you eat each day?
• How many servings of vegetables do you take every day?
• How many times a day do you take chocolate/ice cream?
• How many times a day do you take dairy products?

Scores are assigned for each question, and interpretation is provided for the total score.

The interpretation can fall into something like Needs Improvement / Fair / Good / Excellent.

This interpretation helps us assess ourselves and take necessary action, like meeting a physician.

The Healthy Eating Assessment template is available in BlockSurvey.

You can draw inspiration from these templates and customize the template when needed.

3. Mental Health Assessments

Mental assessments are used to assess mental health.

Psychiatrists use assessment scales to assess the mental health of their patients.

There are mental assessment scales to measure anxiety, stress, depression, aggression, and more.

Let’s look into assessing one's level of anxiety.

How anxious are you?

GAD7 (Generalized Anxiety Disorder) was developed to assess the level of anxiety in adults. It is a 7-item psychological rating scale used to assess the severity of anxiety in adults.

Below are a few questions picked from the GAD7 scale.

• Are you feeling nervous?
• Are you not able to stop worrying?
• Do you have trouble relaxing?
• Are you getting easily irritated?
• Are you feeling afraid?

The GAD7 (Generalized Anxiety Disorder) is available in BlockSurvey for your use.

Scores are assigned to each question, and the total score is interpreted.

The interpretation falls in any of the following. Minimal anxiety / Mild anxiety / Moderate Anxiety / Severe Anxiety.

4. Skill Assessments

Skill assessments are used to assess someone's skill.

Teachers, Trainers, or Managers use skill assessment scales to understand respondents' skill levels.

Skills like public speaking, communication, listening, and presentation are evaluated using skill assessments.

How good are you in public speaking?

For example, the public speaking skills assessment scale is a tool used to evaluate an individual’s ability to communicate in public speaking situations.

Below are a few questions that can be included in the public speaking assessment.

• Do you maintain eye contact with all sections of the audience?
• Do you have a vocal variety that does not sound monotonous?
• Were your movements controlled and non-distracting?
• Do you appear confident?
• Do you sound conversational?

The interpretation can be one of the following. Need improvement in public speaking/ Good public speaking skills/ Exceptional public speaking skills.

Move on to 'Learning assessments'.

5. Learning Assessments

Learning assessments help you find out how good someone is at learning.

Teachers use a learning assessment scale to identify their student's ability to learn.

Teachers use them to evaluate students' learning habits and determine where attention is needed.

How well do you learn?

The Learning Strategies Inventory has been developed to measure different aspects of the learning process, including planning, organization, and problem-solving skills.

Teachers, counselors, and administrators use this inventory to help identify areas where students may need additional support or intervention.

Below are a few questions that are asked in the Learning Strategies Assessment.

• Do you preview the material to be discussed in the class?
• Do you go over lecture notes as soon as possible after the lecture?
• Do you rework all of the homework problems before the quiz?
• Do you spend time studying every day outside the class hours?
• Do you participate in a study group?

The interpretation of this assessment will be through different measurements of grade.

Let’s move on to discuss 'Drug Assessments'.

6. Drug Assessments

Drug and Alcohol assessments help you find out how addicted you are to drugs and alcohol.

Drug assessments help you to find the level of dependence.

It also helps to find the possibility of how easily you can come out of addiction.

How much dependent are you on Cigarettes?

The Cigarette Dependence Scale (CDS) is a measure used to assess an individual’s level of dependence on cigarettes.

It assesses the intensity of physical and psychological dependence and the frequency of smoking.

• How many cigarettes do you smoke per day?
• Do you smoke immediately after waking up?
• How easy or difficult is it for you to quit smoking?
• Does the idea of not having a cigarette cause stress?
• Do you drop everything sometimes to go out and buy cigarettes?

Like other assessment scales, The Cigarette Dependence Scale is also in BlockSurvey’s template gallery.

The interpretation of cigarette dependence scores can be Mild Cigarette dependence/ Moderate Cigarette dependence/ Severe Cigarette dependence.

Test Your Knowledge

Key Takeaways

• Assessments are holistic tools for evaluation.
• Assessments can be used for self-assessment.
• Various use cases for Assessments.

Congratulations! You have completed this lesson.