Assessment fundamentals

• Include information about your educational philosophy and its link to assessment in your syllabus. 
• Provide a rationale for all assessment activities and link them to learning outcomes.
• Have students put assessment criteria into practice (i.e. have students grade some sample assignments; have students evaluate or design test questions based on certain criteria).
• Solicit student feedback on learning and assessment experiences (i.e. stop, start, continue).

• Include a variety of assessment strategies in the course to appeal to various learning styles and intelligences; offer choices if possible.
• Incorporate Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles.
• Focus learners on the need-to-know information and its application.

• Communicate assessment criteria and rationale both verbally and in writing.
• Develop rubrics to communicate the differences between levels of performance.

• Break learning outcomes down into building blocks and slowly build knowledge and skills.
• Assess at various stages/steps of the process, not just at the end.
• Structure classroom activities similarly to assessment activities so students can practise.
• Use a lesson planning model to guide instruction.

• Engage students in discussion about their learning and the learning process.
• Include formative assessments as part of your assessment strategy (i.e. group quiz, games, one-minute paper, 10-question review, muddiest moments, etc.).
• Assess milestones in the process instead of just the final product.
• Engage students in self-assessment; give them tools or strategies they can use to monitor learning.

• Develop a clear understanding of industry expectations and structure assessment accordingly.
• Identify essential skills within learning outcomes and assess them with discipline specific outcomes.
• Access resources throughout the college to facilitate teaching and learning of essential skills.

• Connect your subject area to things students care about (i.e. ask them what they hope to get out of the course, or what life questions and/or challenges learning in your course might help them with).
• Structure assessment tasks so students must make connections between course content—theories, concepts, and models—and the world.
• Develop assessment activities that integrate several learning outcomes (i.e. projects, portfolios).
• Design assessment tasks that reflect current problems and challenges in industry.
• Use external evaluators to assess some aspect of learning and/or performance (i.e. project, portfolio, performance, product).

• Participate in program renewal processes and in program curriculum discussions.
• Get involved in campus-wide initiatives that strive to improve teaching and learning.

• Include moral and ethical dilemmas of the industry in teaching and assessment.
• Reflect on the changes—cognitive, psychomotor, affective—that have helped you as the faculty be successful in the industry; try to build these into assessments.
• Strive to continuously improve student learning (i.e. re-evaluating teaching and assessment strategies).
• Structure assessment tasks that take students out into the community or require them to utilize community resources (i.e. interviews, field studies, directory, profiles).

• The faculty will get feedback on their explanation of the concept.
• Students will clarify their thinking as they verbally express the concept.
• Other students can provide feedback on the explanation (i.e. confusing, incomplete, too much detail, adequate, excellent).

Oral multiple choice questions where students vote on the correct answer.

Online quizzes that students complete multiple times, until they feel they have an adequate grasp of the material.

Students answer/solve quiz questions/problems as a team, competing with other teams (i.e. use a popular game show format).

Consider the following questions:

• What were the key points of this topic?
• What aspects of the topic are still unclear?
• What is a question you still have after today’s class?

Responses can be written on an index card, posted online, consolidated in groups and posted around the room for discussion, etc.

Self-assessment tools such as rubrics, checklists and rating charts, where students can assess their own performance.

Peer-assessment activities where students provide feedback on each other’s performance using a clear and structured outline of assessment criteria (i.e. rubric, checklist, rating chart).

• In quadrant A, students identify one thing the faculty is doing that is helping them learn and should stay the same.
• In quadrant B, students identify one thing the faculty is doing that is not working for them, and that they would like to see changed.
• In quadrant C, students identify one thing they are doing themselves that is helping them learn and that they would recommend to other students.
• In quadrant D, students write down one thing they might do themselves to improve their learning in this subject.

The faculty poses a problem or series of questions to students based on the instruction.

Students formulate an individual response, compare it to a partner’s response, and then compare it against a model of excellence.

Students then share challenges, barriers or questions related to achieving the ideal response.

There are many free and easy-to-use digital solutions for gathering formative assessment data that streamline the collection of student responses and assessments, while providing faculty with the ability to easily collect and organize their student data.

Many digital assessment tools can also be used to quickly gather students responses and gain better insight as to which pieces of content require more or less attention. Learn more about tools for assessment.

Experts use frameworks in their disciplines intuitively (i.e. scientific method, problem solving, design processes, planning frameworks).

Making frameworks explicit allows learners to spend more time working with the content.

Charts and other visual organizers (i.e. timelines, Venn diagrams, trees, flow charts, outlines, storyboards, tables, graphs, diagrams) provide clear structures for extracting, organizing and processing information.

Breaking complex tasks into steps provides the structure many students need to get started on and complete a learning task successfully.

Such guides encourage faculty to articulate how they, as experts, work through the task.

Guiding questions help learners focus their attention and act as a filter for large amounts of information.

Faculty don’t generally have time to teach students all the skills they need to effectively complete assignments. However, we can provide them with supporting informational resources for reference.

Self- or peer assessments are generally only effective when students have clear structures and guidelines that help focus their attention and give them the language they need to give constructive feedback.

Students work at completing a quiz collaboratively. They submit one copy of the quiz as a group. This requires students to discuss answers so that everyone agrees.

Alternatively, students could complete the quiz individually first, hand that one in, and then work on the collaborative one.

Have students work in pairs to quiz each other, changing roles between questioner and responder after a predetermined block of questions.

In class, put the students into groups and assign a chapter to each group. Have each group review the chapter outcomes and make the outcomes into questions. Then, have each group work on point-form answers to the questions.

To share the content with the class, have students type up their work and post it on Blackboard, so that those who want to review have access.

Have students work to create a list of things they believe will be on the test and why.

Students then share what they have on their lists with the class, and the faculty member can use some way of giving feedback on the importance and whether they have a good understanding or not.

Have students work in pairs or teams to create questions and answers to challenge classmates.

As faculty, you can commit to using some of the questions on the test. The questions rotate amongst the groups and then are marked by the group that created them. This could be completed in person or via a shared online document.

Provide each student with a diagram of a process that they need to know for the test.

In a pair, each student will have a different diagram. Student A teaches their diagram to student B by writing in the labels and explaining the process. Student B can provide feedback along the way.

As a large group, you can clarify anything that was unclear. Then, student B teaches their diagram to student A using the same process.

Working with students to visually map out a process and having them practise this mapping can re-inforce the neural networks related to that process.

For examples, visit 19 Types of Graphic Organizers for Effective Teaching and Learning.

Provide review questions focused on various units, topics, or concepts.

Students get a certain amount of time at each station and move around the room, adding, reading and revising existing content.

Take photos of the responses and share them. Stations could include tips for learning and remembering.

Review questions are written on the front of an index card and answers are written on the back.

Students ask two people their question and then they switch cards with someone to get a new question.

Terms or concepts are written on a bingo card.

Students have to explain three different terms to three different students, and have three terms explained to them to get a bingo.

Have students write down five or more things they can remember related to a topic.

Have different parts of the class focus on different topics.

Students first write what they can remember individually, and then they work in pairs and compare their lists.

Have each part of the class present back their list on the topic they worked on. As faculty, you can then fill in the blanks on anything important that was missed.

Placement activities create a space for both individual and collective voices related to topics. They can be used to explore what students already know about a topic and to build shared knowledge.

Individuals take a few minutes to write their responses and ideas related to the topic in their quadrant. Then, each person takes turns sharing something that they wrote down, and if two or more people agree, it goes in the centre circle. Finally, faculty can have various groups share one or more things from their centre circle. Groups can be asked to prioritize thoughts before sharing in the large group.

Targeted cases can be a great way to help students review learning at all levels of Bloom’s taxonomy. It is a great way for students and faculty to see how well students are able to apply information and use it to analyze a situation.

When using cases for review, it’s important to structure the activity so students focus their efforts on the appropriate knowledge and thinking.

This online crossword puzzle maker allows you to easily enter text and create a crossword that can be produce either online, as a PDF, or as a Word document.

To get started, check out Free, Online Crossword Puzzle Maker – Crossword Labs.

Simple questions at the beginning or end of class can engage students in retrieval practice.

Exit tickets or “Ticket Out the Door” can be a great way to have more students feel accountable for writing something since they have to hand it to you on the way out the door.

A quick read through the responses can give you, as the teacher, great insight into students’ grasp of a topic. This can also be done using Socrative, which allows short answer responses and tracking.

At the beginning of the class, try “From memory, try to list at least five things we talked about in the last class in relation to Topic X” or “Here is a list of terms from last class. In pairs, come up with one example of each and be ready to explain why it is a good example.” 

At the end of class, try “Describe in your own words how _________ process works.” or “Without looking at your notes, explain why __________ is important in this subject.”