Assessment Strategies

Introduction

Assessments are the wide variety of methods or tools that instructors use to evaluate, measure, and document the a learning progress and skill acquisition of students. While assessments are often equated with traditional tests, instructors can use a diverse array of assessment tools and methods beyond the exam. Just as academic lessons have different functions, assessments are typically designed to measure specific elements of learning—e.g., the level of knowledge a student already has about the concept or skill the instructor is planning to teach or the ability to comprehend and analyze different types of texts and readings. Assessments also are used to identify individual student weaknesses and strengths and provide a basis for assigning grades.

Assessment is More than Grading

Instructors often conflate assessment with grading. This is a mistake. It must be understood that student assessment is more than just grading. Remember that assessment links student performance to specific learning objectives in order to provide useful information to instructors and students about student achievement. Traditional grading on the other hand, according to Stassen et al. does not provide the level of detailed and specific information essential to link student performance with improvement. “Because grades don’t tell you about student performance on individual (or specific) learning goals or outcomes, they provide little information on the overall success of your course in helping students to attain the specific and distinct learning objectives of interest.” (Stassen et al., 2001, pg. 6)

Instructors, therefore, must always remember that grading is an aspect of student assessment but does not constitute its totality.

While assessment can take a wide variety of forms in education, the following descriptions provide a representative overview of a few major forms of educational assessment.

Pre-assessments

Pre-assessments are administered before students begin a lesson, unit, course, or academic program. Students are not necessarily expected to know most, or even any, of the material evaluated by pre-assessments—they are generally used to:

  • establish a baseline against which educators measure learning progress over the duration of a program, course, or instructional period, or

  • determine general academic readiness for a course, program, grade level, or new academic program that student may be transferring into.

Formative assessments

Formative assessments are in-process evaluations of student learning that are typically administered multiple times during a lesson. The general purpose of formative assessment is to give educators in-process feedback about what students are learning or not learning so that instructional approaches, teaching materials, and academic support can be modified accordingly. Formative assessments are usually not scored or graded, and they may take a variety of forms, from more formal quizzes and assignments to informal questioning techniques and in-class discussions with students.

The general goal of formative assessment is to collect detailed information that can be used to improve instruction and student learning while it’s happening. What makes an assessment “formative” is not the design of a test, technique, or self-evaluation, per se, but the way it is used—i.e., to inform in-process teaching and learning modifications.

Examples of formative assessments

Questioning Strategies

Questions that instructors pose to individual students and groups of students during the learning process to determine what specific concepts or skills they may be having trouble with. A wide variety of intentional questioning strategies may be employed, such as phrasing questions in specific ways to elicit more useful responses.

Feedback

Specific, detailed, and constructive feedback that instructors provide on student work, such as journal entries, essays, worksheets, research papers, projects, ungraded quizzes, lab results, or works of art, design, and performance. The feedback may be used to revise or improve a work product, for example.

Admit/Exit Slips

“Exit slips” or “exit tickets” that quickly collect student responses to a instructor’s questions at the end of a lesson or class period. Based on what the responses indicate, the instructor can then modify the next lesson to address concepts that students have failed to comprehend or skills they may be struggling with. “Admit slips” are a similar strategy used at the beginning of a class or lesson to determine what students have retained from previous learning experiences.

Peer-assessment

Peer-assessments that allow students to use one another as learning resources. For example, “workshopping” a piece of writing with classmates is one common form of peer assessment, particularly if students follow a rubric or guidelines provided by an instructor.

Self-Tests

Using myCourses, you can create exams that can be taken multiple or an unlimited number of times. These exams can provide immediate feedback to your learners, so they know exactly what they may need to revisit. This type of assessment is particularly good for for lower-level objectives (remembering/understanding). In addition, testing promotes retrieval practice and helps students learn. It is suggested that instructors award a small amount of credit for completion only. One easy way to obtain multiple questions for self-tests is to use textbook publisher banks (it is recommended never to use publisher test banks on summative exams, as most banks are easily available via a Google search.)

Embedded Video Quizzes

Panopto (Binghamton’s video creation and content delivery solution) offers the option to embed a quiz into videos. Students answer questions during pauses in the video and get immediate feedback and the option to review part of the video or retake quiz. Instructors can see results for individuals and the class as a whole.

Personal online learning logs / Journal

Students can create a personal online learning log/journal that includes the core ideas or concepts of each lesson, thoughts and feelings about the topic, questions they may have, etc. The instructor can then use this log to track the learner’s progress and/or respond to questions and concerns.

Summative assessments

Summative assessments are used to evaluate student learning at the conclusion of a specific instructional period—typically at the end of a unit or semester. Summative assessments are defined by three major criteria:

  1. The tests, assignments, or projects are used to determine whether students have learned what they were expected to learn. In other words, what makes an assessment “summative” is not the design of the test, assignment, or self-evaluation, per se, but the way it is used—i.e., to determine whether and to what degree students have learned the material they have been taught.

  2. Summative assessments are given at the conclusion of a specific instructional period, and therefore they are generally evaluative, rather than diagnostic—i.e., they are more appropriately used to determine learning progress and achievement, evaluate the effectiveness of educational programs, measure progress toward improvement goals, or make course-placement decisions, among other possible applications.

  3. Summative-assessment results are often recorded as scores or grades that are then factored into a student’s final grade.

Example Summative Assessment Strategies

Exams and time-constrained, individual assessment

Examinations have traditionally been viewed as a gold standard of assessment in education, particularly in university settings. They can be summative or formative forms of assessment.

Things to Keep in Mind about Exams

  1. Exams can make significant demands on students’ factual knowledge and can have the side-effect of encouraging cramming and surface learning. On the other hand, they can also facilitate student demonstration of deep learning if essay questions or topics are appropriately selected. Different formats include in-class tests, open-book, take-home exams and the like.

  2. In the process of designing an exam, instructors should consider the following questions. What are the learning objectives that the exam seeks to evaluate? Have students been adequately prepared to meet exam expectations? What are the skills and abilities that students need to do well? How will this exam be utilized to enhance the student learning process?

As Brown and Knight assert, utilizing multiple methods of assessment, including more than one assessor, improves the reliability of data. However, a primary challenge to the multiple methods approach is how to weigh the scores produced by multiple methods of assessment. When particular methods produce higher range of marks than others, instructors can potentially misinterpret their assessment of overall student performance. When multiple methods produce different messages about the same student, instructors should be mindful that the methods are likely assessing different forms of achievement. (Brown and Knight, 1994).

Considerations for online exams

Students in online courses can take exams just the same as traditional courses. It should be assumed that all online exams are open-book unless they are proctored. If you are requiring that students take proctored exams and there is a cost associated with that proctoring, you must let them know before the class begins, ideally in the course description. The Federal Textbook Price Disclosure Law (Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008) mandates that all textbook and supplemental materials for each course be listed in the institution's course schedule used for preregistration and registration purposes.

Visit Giving Exams Online: Strategies and Tools and Writing Multiple-Choice Test Questions for more information.

Essays

According to Euan S. Henderson, essays make two important contributions to learning and assessment: the development of skills and the cultivation of a learning style. (Henderson, 1980) Essays are a common form of writing assignment in courses and can be either a summative or formative form of assessment depending on how the instructor utilizes them in the classroom.

Things to Keep in Mind about Essays

  1. A common challenge of the essay is that students can use them simply to regurgitate rather than analyze and synthesize information to make arguments.

  2. Instructors commonly assume that students know how to write essays and can encounter disappointment or frustration when they discover that this is not the case for some students. For this reason, it is important for instructors to make their expectations clear and be prepared to assist or expose students to resources that will enhance their writing skills.

Essays should be scaffolded. Starting with short, low-stakes exercises and building up to a lengthier more formal (research) essay gives both instructor and students many important moments of revision and feedback. You can make sure your students stay on track with their work and improve along the way. For many students, especially those who are not familiar with what goes into larger academic assignments, it is very important to show the structure and process of completing larger projects. Modeling this for them helps them tackle capstone or thesis work later on.

Sequencing larger, otherwise overwhelming assignments into manageable building blocks also opens up the learning process to both instructor and student. Sharing drafts (of reading and writing) with peers and instructor, giving and responding to feedback, writing and rewriting, students see and can reflect on their own learning processes, and, ideally, learn from their own learning. This form of learning, or meta-learning, takes places when students become conscious of how they learn. Focusing on this in your teaching will give your students the tools to become better learners as they understand what works and doesn’t work for them. Simple ways to do this is to ask students to submit a short note with an assignment in which they describe how it went. It will help you respond more constructively to student work when you know they were struggling formulating their argument or synthesizing material, or when they were happy about their improvements in clarity and style.

Projects

Project Based Learning is a teaching method in which students gain knowledge and skills by working for an extended period of time to investigate and respond to an authentic, engaging, and complex question, problem, or challenge.

For an overview of the value of project-based learning in an online classroom, see - Understanding Project-Based Learning in the Online Classroom. (2016, February 5). Faculty Focus | Higher Ed Teaching & Learning.

Presentations (in-class or via Zoom)

In addition to students giving presentation is the classroom, students can also give presentations in webinar style, Binghamton's online meeting software, Zoom, can be used. Presentations can be recorded right in the Zoom platform.

Videos / Recorded Presentations

Students can use Panopto (Binghamton’s video creation and content delivery solution) to record themselves giving presentations or for other forms of video projects. These videos can she shared in a common folder for all students to view or kept private just to the instructor. Other students can comment on the video's content in a similar way as YouTube.

ePortfolios

“An e-portfolio is a digitized collection of artifacts including demonstrations, resources, and accomplishments that represent an individual...This collection can be comprised of text-based, graphic, or multimedia elements archived on a Web site or on other electronic media...An e-portfolio is more than a simple collection—it can also serve as an administrative tool to manage and organize work created with different applications and to control who can see the work. E-portfolios encourage personal reflection and often involve the exchange of ideas and feedback.” (Lorenzo and Ittelson).

Formative assessments are commonly said to be for learning because educators use the results to modify and improve teaching techniques during an instructional period, while summative assessments are said to be of learning because they evaluate academic achievement at the conclusion of an instructional period.

Or as assessment expert Paul Black put it, “When the cook tastes the soup, that’s formative assessment. When the customer tastes the soup, that’s summative assessment.”

References and Additional Resources

  • Allan S. Cohen and James A. Wollack. (n.d.). Handbook on Test Development: Helpful Tips for Creating Reliable and Valid Classroom Tests.

  • Angelo, Thomas A., and K. Patricia Cross. Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers. 2nd edition. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1993. Print.

  • Assessment & Evaluation. (n.d.). Center for Teaching Innovation, Cornell University. Retrieved June 12, 2020,

  • Brookfield, Stephen D. Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995. Print.

  • Brown, Sally, and Peter Knight. Assessing Learners in Higher Education. 1 edition. London; Philadelphia: Routledge, 1998. Print.

  • Cameron, Jeanne et al. “Assessment as Critical Praxis: A Community College Experience.” Teaching Sociology 30.4 (2002): 414–429. JSTOR. Web.

  • Educational Assessment Archives. (n.d.). Faculty Focus | Higher Ed Teaching & Learning. Retrieved June 12, 2020

  • Formative Feedback Resources. (n.d.). Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning. Retrieved June 12, 2020

  • Gibbs, Graham and Claire Simpson. “Conditions under which Assessment Supports Student Learning. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education 1 (2004): 3-31.

  • Gikandi, J. W., Morrow, D., & Davis, N. E. (2011). Online formative assessment in higher education: A review of the literature. Computers & Education, 57(4), 2333–2351.

  • GW Teaching and Learning Center. (n.d.). Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs). Retrieved June 12, 2020

  • Henderson, Euan S. “The Essay in Continuous Assessment.” Studies in Higher Education 5.2 (1980): 197–203. Taylor and Francis+NEJM. Web.

  • Lorenzo, G., & Ittelson, J. (2005). An Overview of E-Portfolios. EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative.

  • Maki, Peggy L. “Developing an Assessment Plan to Learn about Student Learning.” The Journal of Academic Librarianship 28.1 (2002): 8–13. ScienceDirect. Web. The Journal of Academic Librarianship.

  • Mueller, J. (n.d.). Authentic Assessment Toolbox Home Page. Retrieved June 12, 2020

  • Mergendoller, J., Markham, T., Ravitz, J, & Larmer, J. (2006). Scaffolding Project Based Learning: Tools, Tactics and Technology to Facilitate Instruction and Management. In C. S. W. Carolyn M. Evertson (Ed.), Handbook of Classroom Management: Research,Practice, and Contemporary Issues. Lawrence Erlbaum, Inc.

  • MIT Teaching and Learning Laboratory. (n.d.). Formative Assessment. Retrieved June 12, 2020

  • National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment. (n.d.). New to Assessment?. Retrieved June 12, 2020

  • Sharkey, Stephen, and William S. Johnson. Assessing Undergraduate Learning in Sociology. ASA Teaching Resource Center, 1992. Print.

  • Office of Academic Planning & Assessment, University of Massachusetts Amherst. (n.d.). Course Based Review and Assessment: Methods for Understanding Student Learning.

  • Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding By Design. 2nd Expanded edition. Alexandria, VA: Assn. for Supervision & Curriculum Development, 2005. Print.