Diagnostic Assessment

Professors can use diagnostic assessment or activities at the beginning of a course or unit of study within the course. This can be pre-testing, or asking students questions to gauge their knowledge, skills, and weaknesses in a particular area of study. This offers several potential advantages:

• You can use resulting data to modify your course, to the extent possible on short notice. Over time, you may build out different modules that can be switched in and out of a course, depending on how students report their readiness in a pre-test.

• Pre-tests can help students grasp course expectations, and preview things that will later be graded.

• In some disciplines there may be value in asking students to try something before they're ready: using what you know now, try to solve this problem. This isn't a "gotcha" exercise aimed at making students feel ignorant. It's a way of illustrating to students what piece is missing from their current understanding and, after you teach it to them, how that piece fits into bigger context.

• At the end of a course, you can compare the pre-test or survey results with later assessments to see how effective the course was for students. Over a period of several semesters, you can better judge which methods are effective for teaching various lessons.

Another diagnostic assessment might aim at aligning course content with student motivations and purpose, where practical. You may ask students to report their majors or program affiliation, student level, previous experiences, or other facts less directly related to the course content, but that still might help you plan a better course. For example, the history instructor who learns that a bunch of finance majors have enrolled in her 100-level history course basically to fulfill core requirements might swap out a lesson focused on medical history, for a lesson dealing with business history.