Assessment
Simply said, assessment is about identifying what students should learn and then determining how well a student has learned.
Assessments should grow out of the learning objectives that have been established for students. Making sure that assessments are in alignment with the learning objectives means that students can gain a better understanding of what they have learned and where they have fallen short.
Faculty may use problem-solving, case studies, debates, analytic essays or collaborative activities as well as descriptive essays, summaries, factual tests, and traditional research papers to assess their students.
Sometimes the experience and process of learning are as important for students as the deliverable--in that case, an assessment will require that students follow a particular path to attain the deliverable. For example, you may want to have an incremental research project which grades students on each stage of the research, from focusing on a topic to creating a working bibliography to delivering an outline, successive drafts, and a final paper. In a course that requires problem solving, you may ask students to show how they arrived at a solution, not only give the solution.
Another important aspect of finding the right mix of assessments is providing a chance for students to reflect on what they have learned. This may involve something as simple as an initial assignment that requires students to reveal what they already know and to later follow up with an assignment that asks them to reflect on how their perceptions have changed during the course.
Probably some of the greatest pitfalls instructors face in devising assessments for online courses are over-reliance on one or two types of assessment and not thoroughly thinking throug the details and organization of those assessments.
Instructors should strive to use a variety of different assessments so that students have an adequate opportunity to demonstrate their learning, so that instructors are able to gain a full picture of the students proficiencies and weaknesses, and also to provide a measure of security that comes from being able to compare student work presented in different contexts.
The folllowing provides some notes on a few types of assessments and the respective issues raised by their use:
Peer-to-Peer Assessments
These include peer review and critiques, using instructor-provided rubrics as guidelines. These can be particularly effective in that they require students to scrutinize an assignment twice--first, upon completing the assignment on their own, and the second time, with fresh eyes as they evaluate anothers work. For peer review to be most effective, a portion of the students grade should be assigned based on how well the student has critiqued another in addition to the work that the student himself has produced. Peer review is typically accomplished via written comments but it can also be in the form of a table that students fill out according to criteria provided by the instructor.
Collaborative Group Assignments
If you do not assess and grade both the individual effort and the collaborative one, students will tend to slight that portion that is not graded. Many instructors find it difficult to assess group work--they want to make sure that they are not unfairly slighting individual contributions. This challenge can be met in two ways--make sure the group effort is observable to you so that individual contributions are obvious and ask students to evaluate each others efforts as well as their own. If you ask students to evaluate other group members, make sure that you provide a simplified rubric to them to do so. Also request that your students evaluate their own work by means of this rubric. Let them know that the peer evaluations will not be the only element in their grade and that you intend to assess their contribution to the group independently of this peer effort.
Research Papers
Make sure that your assessment criteria for research papers include stipulations about what proportion of research references may be derived from the Web, what portion from electronic resources provided by the library and what portion from other books and journals. Mention which documentation system is to be used and what part of the grade, if any, will be determined by the accuracy of documentation.
Portfolios
Some positive aspects of using portfolios are that they assist students in reflecting on their own progress and critiquing their own work. Some drawbacks are that student portfolios may not be truly representative of the range of a students work and if not scrutinized as part of a greater whole, could present a misleading picture of the students intellectual attainment.
When it comes to using portfolios as true assessment tools instructors need to make sure that they:
- define the types of assignments that can be used in the portfolio
- determine a time line for the collection of these assignments (i.e., are these to be collected as students go along, or chosen only at some end point?)
- establish the criteria by which the student portfolios will be assessed
To ensure that any assessment tool is effective, the following steps should be followed:
- Carefully analyze the course goals and objectives
- Clarify the objectives, skills, and concepts that are to be taught
- Specify indicators of student performance and expected outcomes
- Develop the questions, topics, or tasks based on these indicators
- Use the indicators to evaluate the students performance, establishing a minimal expectation, middle, and upper level expectation for performance
Feedback
One simple definition of feedback is that it is grading student work and giving the student the reason behind the grade. But actually, feedback is a complex process that continues throughout a course. Feedback can be in the form of comments and questions or it can be a letter grade, numerical points, or several of these combined into a rubric grading matrix. Research conducted by UMUCs Institute for Research, Assessment, and Evaluation (IRAHE) demonstrates that frequent and sufficient feedback is a primary determinant of student satisfaction, but even more importantly from the standpoint of student learning outcomes, it is also one of the main factors that can help students grow, improve, and progress.Feedback needs to be adapted to what one is assessing in student work. You may want to read the following short article, The Art of Feedback previously published here in the DE Oracle that details some different types of techniques that are useful in a variety of teaching situations, and offers some tips for giving effective feedback.
Rubrics
Grading rubrics, also known as scoring or assessment rubrics, are a way to simplify the sometimes wearying process of assessment and to ensure a certain level of objectivity and consistency. Using rubrics provides benefits to both faculty and students. Every experienced instructor has a mental set of guidelines and criteria, in effect, informal rubrics, that guide his or her assessment of student work. A grading rubric scale can be developed to make this a more explicit process.
A rubric is basically a grid or matrix in which assessment criteria are identified, described in terms of specific performance behavior expected and prioritized according to some sort of ascending or descending grading scale. The simplest form of rubric we are all familiar with is probably the A-F grading scale.
When a rubric is shared with students, it can also help clear up some of the questions students have as they try to understand faculty expectations. Using a grading rubric does not mean that one abandons the subtle discernment and analysis that allow one to balance and juggle different criteria--a grading rubric is merely a tool to make the judging and weighing more efficient and to help ensure that no aspect is neglected. The use of rubrics provides clear sets of guidelines to students as they plan and actually work on their assignments and means that students generally see less to challenge faculty on in terms of questioning their grades. Faculty often find that setting themselves the task of creating a rubric also helps them write more clearly defined assignments. If assignments are well constructed and unambiguous, students are more likely to be responsive to the assignment and there is less need for feedback that ends up being the instructors repeated explanation of the assignment. While faculty need to invest the initial time to create a suitable rubric for each type of assignment, they save time when it comes to the actual grading process. By reference to a rubric, students can immediately see the areas where they excelled or fell short.
Naturally your first guide in formulating a framework for assessing student work should be the assignments themselves. As you fully develop each assignment, you may also create a simple grading rubric that can assist you in the assessment process and help to communicate your expectations to your students as well.
Responsiveness to the stated requirements of the assignment must be one of the main measures of grading any assignment. In addition to the specific requirements of each assignment, any rubric should include some general expectations about quality student work such as coherent and logical writing, well constructed sentences and paragraphs, and no more than a few minor errors in spelling, punctuation, or grammar.
Faculty should not rely completely on rubrics to provide feedback. Along with a score drawn from the rubric, faculty can add comments that offer additional feedback specific to the students performance.
CTL offers workshops on the topics of feedback and creating rubrics several times each year. These include The Art of Feedback, Effective Writing Assignments, and Creating Effective Rubrics. Watch for our upcoming workshops at the CTL Workshops page.
