◉ REQUIRED STANDARD

Expectations

• 1. Assessments, learning outcomes, and learning activities should align in a clear and direct way. Your assessment formats should provide a reasonable way to measure your stated learning outcomes.

  2. Assessments can be quizzes facilitated through D2L, or any number of other methods to evaluate the progress of the student (e.g. research papers, discussions, assignments, etc.).

  3. The key to satisfying this review standard is to make sure those assessments match your learning outcomes (see examples below).

Examples

• • Why should assessments, learning objectives, and instructional strategies be aligned.

  • A simple example would be that if you require your students to be able to articulate their opinions through writing, you should require them to write a paper or participate in a discussion. Taking a multiple-choice quiz to assess this outcome would not be appropriate. That is not to say that multiple-choice quizzes are inappropriate; for example, if you want to address critical thinking, you can pose a question and give a list of scenarios:

• • outcome/assessment alignment:

    • a problem analysis evaluates critical thinking skills

    • a multiple choice quiz verifies vocabulary knowledge

    • a composition assesses writing skills

  • inconsistent alignment between learning outcomes and assessment:

    • the outcome is to be able to "write a persuasive essay" but the assessment is a multiple choice test

    • the outcome is to "demonstrate discipline-specific information literacy" and the assessment is a rubric-scored term paper, but students are not given any practice with information literacy skills on smaller assignments

References

• • QM FIPSE rubric III.1