Tick and Flick Won’t Cut It: Designing Practical Observations That Hold Up 

There is a simple rule at the heart of practical assessment: if you’re assessing a skill, you have to see the student do it. 

Knowledge assessment and skill assessment are not interchangeable. If we are assessing knowledge, the student must tell us something. If we are assessing a skill, we have to watch them perform it — or examine the product they have created, whether that is the dish they cooked, the report they wrote, or the thing they built. A student explaining how they would do something is not evidence that they can do it. Questioning can give you evidence of knowledge, but questioning on its own can almost never give you evidence of skill that meets the Rules of Evidence.