The NCME Code of Professional Responsibilities, Essay Example

The NCME Code of Professional Responsibilities in Educational Measurement represents the set of rules and guidelines the educational researchers have to comply with in order to provide integrity, ethics, and professionalism dimensions to their research. Article 1.6 of the Code states that the information collected in the process of research should be made available for only appropriate persons, with proper reference to reliability, validity, scoring, and reporting processes. Hence, I intend to follow this article, and communicate all results’ measurement peculiarities to the audience and to the participants to guarantee the proper, adequate understanding of the research process and results.

Moreover, Article 1.7 presupposes the protection of privacy for those participating in the research, and Article 1.8 states that the research assessors have to be cautioned against misinterpretations and misuses of data. These are very important articles of the NCME Code, since the data from research may be ambiguous in certain aspects, so the researcher and the target audience should be able to evaluate the data objectively, and not to make false conclusions and inferences from the research data. Thus may be the key challenge for me as a researcher – the correct, objective, and unambiguous presentation of data is essential for guaranteeing the correct research process. However, data may be not immediately available at times, which makes the researcher make some deductions; this process is most error-prone, since the researcher makes conclusions from the subjective, personal viewpoint, and it is often very hard to assess data gathered on one’s own in a detached way.

Finally, Article 4.2 is highly important in terms of conducting action research, since it presupposes that only qualified professionals knowledgeable about this type of research should conduct it. I believe it is of vital importance to follow these NCME Code guidelines, since false research may misguide the educational science, and may bring the empirical data in incompliance with the theoretical postulates, which is likely to erode both the theory and practice of education. Hence, it is necessary to have research assessed by qualified and detached specialists who would be able to detect inconsistencies, and preclude the false research findings from penetrating the research field in education.

References

Code of Professional Responsibilities in Educational Measurement (1995). National Council on Measurement in Education. Retrieved from http://www.niu.edu/assessment/manual/_docs/EthicsCode.pdf