Assessment is one of the most influential factors in promoting learning. Assessment motivates students to do the work, steers their approach to the material, and informs teachers about the impact of their teaching strategies on student learning.
On this page, you will find:
Purposes of Assessment
An assessment will typically fulfill one of two general purposes.
Formative assessments are designed to help you monitor and enhance student learning (e.g., a low-stakes reading quiz that gives students practice in recalling key concepts). In the online environment, formative assessment often replaces classroom interactions where instructors receive and give timely, specific feedback at short-term intervals to promote further learning. Formative assessments often provide students with structure and guidance that help them persist in overcoming the challenging aspects of taking an online course.
Summative assessments allow students to demonstrate their achievement of the learning objectives at the end of the learning process (e.g., a high-stakes cumulative final exam over all of the course content, providing data that describes students' level of attainment).
The following table further highlights the differences between formative and summative assessment.
Factors for Comparison | Formative Assessment | Summative Assessment |
|---|---|---|
Purpose | To elicit evidence of learning to gauge and improve the quality of student learning prior to major assessments | To provide evidence for evaluating or grading students |
Characteristics |
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Emphasis |
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Examples |
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Assessment is a form of teaching. Sometimes, formative assessment is integrated within a learning activity; the activity builds student and faculty insight into learning and teaching. For example, student participation in group discussion provides them an opportunity to process concepts more deeply (a learning activity), while generating observations that allow instructors to assess the degree to which students know or are able to do a given learning task, and identify the part students do not know or able to do for future teaching and learning (an assessment activity).
Types of Assessments
After you determine the purpose of the assessment (formative or summative), you will want to decide which type of assessment will provide you with the information you want about student achievement. Richard Stiggins (2013) offers a simple framework for thinking about four main assessment options, as outlined in the table below.
Factors for Comparison | Selected Response | Written Response | Performance Assessment | Personal Communication |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Description | Students choose one or more answers from a limited set of pre-written answers (e.g., multiple-choice, multiple answer, true-false, and matching questions). | Students provide written answers to one or more questions or writing prompts. | Instructors observe and assess student performance of skills or assess student-created products. | Direct communication with and between students, either in person or through technologies. |
Online Tools | Online learning management systems (such as Canvas) include tools for incorporating selected-response questions into tests with automatic grading/feedback. | Online learning management systems usually support short-answer, fill-in-the-blank, and essay questions on tests. Specific writing tools include discussion boards, blogs, learning journals, wikis, and a wide assortment of word-processing programs (like Google Documents). | Online learning management systems often include tools for creating and sharing performance evaluation rubrics. Supporting tools include those for creating group projects (such as wikis and web conferencing for group collaboration), tools for student portfolios (including web-building sites, pictures, audio recordings, videos, and screen capture/recording technologies. | Discussion boards, web conferencing such as Zoom and Google Hangout Meet, blogs; phone calls, email, text messages, social networking tools, and audio/video recordings can also apply. |
Advantages | Excellent for measuring mastery of objective content knowledge and reasoning skills (cognitive domain). Easy to grade. Provides immediate feedback to students. | Promotes deep learning of content. Easy and quick to develop. Can be used to measure a wide range of thinking skills (cognitive domain). | Best way to provide relevant, authentic, direct assessment of skills or products created while using skills (psychomotor domain). Can provide both immediate and delayed feedback to students. | Excellent method for assessing student attitudes, feelings, or dispositions (affective domain). Useful for open-ended questions and uncovering issues that are impeding the learning process. Can ask probing questions to reveal details about student knowledge mastery that cannot be achieved through any other means. Powerful way to promote positive student-student and student-teacher relationships (which significantly increases learning). Very good for providing immediate, corrective feedback. |
Disadvantages | Takes time to develop for the first time, or to cull out publisher’s test bank questions that do not appropriately measure learning in your given course. Limited usefulness in assessing performance skills, subjective responses, or ability to create products. | Takes time to grade. Delayed feedback on graded assignments may discourage or frustrate students. Students may ignore feedback if they cannot revise and resubmit for a grade. | Takes time to perform assessments and assign grades. Delayed feedback on product assessments may discourage or frustrate students. | Time consuming. May be difficult to grade uniformly, since probing questions may vary considerably depending on student responses. |
Incorporating a variety of assessment methods when designing a course is a “best practice” for several reasons. First, coming at assessment from multiple perspectives helps to ensure a more accurate, fair sampling of student performance. Second, multiple assessment methods can provide a good mix of immediate and delayed feedback to students. Finally, students have the opportunity to repeatedly recall and apply what they have learned in different ways, which promotes long-term retention of knowledge and skills.
Tools to Deliver Assessments
A wide variety of tools may be used to assess student learning in an online course. The following tools are available as part of the Canvas learning management system. Other learning management systems such as Blackboard and Moodle will have a similar set of tools. Your experience in this workshop covers a variety of tools that can provide a window into student learning. It may be of interest to note that you're able to sample learning for all your students, not just the ones who are most vocal.
Tests: Question types include multiple-choice, multiple-answer, true-false, matching, short-answer, essay, etc.
Surveys: All question types, including Likert-scale items.
Assignments: Work may be submitted directly in the text box or as an attached document.
Discussion: Posts to threads may be graded by the instructor or rated by other students.
Other tools are readily available outside of the learning management system, and they may be used in whatever way works best for you and the students. These tools include the following.
Zoom: Instructors may use this web conferencing tool to conduct oral exams or watch students perform particular tasks.
Google Docs, Sheets , and Slides: Instructors can see which students have edited a document or submitted comments.
Email: Still one of the easiest ways to have students send you assessment results that you want to check and return.
Audio/Video Recordings: Students may use various audio/video recording programs to record their performance of a task or their response to a test question (Panopto, Flipgrid, YouTube, etc.).
Publisher-Based Assessments: Many textbook publishers provide online assessments that students may access on the publisher's own learning management system.
There are other tools that you may employ in your course, but this sampling gives you a good idea of the many options available to you.
5 Keys to Effective Assessment
Eleanor Dougherty (2012) stated it simply, "A well-crafted assignment is functional and worthwhile in time, effort and achievement." To help you achieve this goal, Richard Stiggins (2013) proposed these five elements of effective assessments:
1. Clear Purpose
When students know the purpose of an assignment it allows them to direct their effort appropriately. The following questions can clarify the purpose of an assessment:
Why is the assessment being given?
Who will use the results?
How will the results be used?
How will students use the results?
What knowledge will students gain from completing the assignment?
How does that knowledge relate to other topics in your course or other courses?
How will the knowledge be relevant for students in their lives beyond your course or beyond college?
What skills will students practice while doing the assignment?
How do those skills relate to other contexts or examples where these skills were important, within your course or beyond?
How will these skills be valuable to students in their lives beyond your course or beyond college?
2. Clear Learning Targets
Clearly stated learning objectives are essential to the design of appropriate testing procedures and assessment items. The following questions help to ensure that assessments have clear learning targets:
What are the learning objectives and are they clearly stated?
Are the learning objectives in alignment with this type of assessment?
Do the learning objectives reflect what is being assessed in the assessment and vice versa?
Are performance criteria clearly articulated?
Communicate specific characteristics that make the performance excellent such as clarity of thought, originality, organization, focus, and assignment-specific parameters
Are models or samples of previous work provided?
3. Quality Assessment Methods
Once you know why the assessment is being given (#1) and what will be measured (#2), you can turn to questions about your methods of assessment--the general types of assessments you will use, the tools used to administer the assessment, and the solutions you have chosen to address possible assessment problems.
It's important that you have an adequate sampling of the students learning. You need to have a sufficient number of clearly written and relevant questions to accurately measure the depth and breadth of student knowledge and skill.
In addition, the methods should reduce or eliminate possible sources of bias that would decrease confidence in the validity and reliability of the assessment results.
What type of assessment will be used?
Are the questions of high quality?
Will an adequate sampling of the student's knowledge and skills be used?
# of questions, variety of assessment types, alignment with content and prior activities
Are sources of bias avoided?
Will students self-assess?
What measures will be taken to ensure Academic Integrity?
Avoid sources of bias in tests:
Build student confidence in test-taking and the knowledge being tested through sufficient practice and feedback
Provide clearly worded directions and questions
Allow adequate time for reading
Evaluate appropriate (reasonable) criteria, providing one correct or best response
Avoid grammatical and cultural cues in question stems or answers.
4. Effective Communication of the Results
The last two keys of assessment quality promote effective use of the assessment results. In order to fulfill the assessment's purpose, it is imperative that the results are communicated to students in a timely manner. Your answers to the following questions will help you form a solid communication plan:
How will grading take place?
How will feedback be provided to students?
How will you use grading information to plan the next steps for the students, or to plan revisions to your instructional strategies and materials? How might this work, logistically?
How will students let you know the results have been successfully communicated?
5. Student-Involved Assessment During Learning
If you want the assessments to impact student learning, you must involve them in assessing their own progress. The key in all of this is to make sure you know how both you and your students will use the feedback from the assessments. The feedback should be designed to help the students to know (a) where they are now, (b) where they need to be, and (b) how to close the gap (Hattie and Yates, 2014). After receiving feedback from their assessments, students should have a better idea of the next steps they need to take and how to take them.
How will you make the learning targets (learning objectives) clear to students?
How will you involve students in assessment development (as appropriate)?
How will students set goals for learning and then assess and track their progress?
How will students communicate with you and with each other about their learning?
Actively involving students in the assessment process also suggests that learners are practicing and receiving prompt feedback on the skills and knowledge to be assessed.
