Assessment and Evaluation in Health Education
This domain tests whether you can select, build, and interpret assessments and evaluate health education programs without overclaiming. Expect formative versus summative assessment, validity and reliability, item quality, rubrics, and process, impact, and outcome evaluation.
Core rules
- Assessment measures learning; evaluation judges program merit or worth. Formative assessment occurs during instruction and guides reteaching; summative assessment occurs after and documents achievement.
- Validity means the instrument measures what it claims; reliability means scores are consistent. A scale can be reliable but invalid. Content validity matches objectives; inter-rater reliability matters for performances; test-retest is unstable for rapidly changing knowledge.
- Write items aligned to one objective, with a clear stem, one defensible answer, and plausible distractors. Avoid double negatives, “all of the above,” and cues.
- Rubrics: analytic rubrics score criteria separately; holistic rubrics give one overall score. Use performance tasks for skills such as refusal or CPR.
- Program evaluation: process asks whether it was delivered; impact covers short-term knowledge, skills, and behavior; outcome covers long-term health status. Logic models link inputs, activities, outputs, and outcomes. Pre/post gains without a comparison group do not prove causation.
Worked example
A pre/post quiz rises from 55% to 75%. The coordinator claims the program caused a 20-point gain. The reasoning: this is plausible but not causal. Maturation, testing, selection, and history could explain it. A stronger claim needs a comparison group, consistent implementation data, and ideally multiple measures.
Traps
Using satisfaction as an outcome; treating reliability and validity as synonyms; writing items that test reading speed rather than health knowledge; using pre/post data as proof; changing the test to make scores look better; ignoring subgroup results.