Designing Quality Assessment Tasks

Before designing individual tasks, it is worth spending some time considering how the formal assessment suite for the unit as a whole will work. Coverage of the unit’s curriculum is usually split between the tasks in some form, and individual tasks may lack in one criterion which is then made up for in other tasks, for instance. Prior planning should remove these shortfalls at the unit level.

When developing assessment tasks, it is important to work through a process. Wiliam, 2014, discusses the importance of starting with a consideration of what we want students to be able to do.

Step 1: What do we want students to show evidence of? (what are the big ideas in the unit?)

Step 2: What evidence do we need to collect to support these claims?

Step 3: What task will allow this evidence to be collected?

These three steps form the starting point when designing assessment and are supported by the work of Wiggins and McTighe (2011) in their Understanding By Design work. Wiggins and McTighe advocate that teachers should: identify desired results, determine acceptable evidence and then plan instruction to facilitate this.

Quality assessment is developed individually and collaboratively. Where assessment is developed individually it should be peer reviewed. Assessment tasks should be considered through the lens of the student who will be taking the assessment.

In addition, strategies for moderating and meshing student results must be planned.