What is student assessment?
Assessment tells us whether students have achieved the desired learning outcomes of a course. It is a cyclical process that allows teachers to improve their instructional strategies and students to grow as learners. According to Suskie (2009) the process includes:
- Establishing clear, measurable expected outcomes of student learning;
- Ensuring that students have sufficient opportunities to achieve those outcomes;
- Systematically gathering, analyzing and interpreting evidence to determine how well student learning matches our expectations; and
- Using the resulting information to understand and improve student learning (p.4).
The difference between assessment and grading
Commenting on students’ relationships with assessment and grading, Gibbs (2006) states:
Students are strategic as never before, and they allocate their time and focus their attention on what they believe will be assessed and what they believe will gain good grades. Assessment frames learning, creates learning activity and orients all aspects of learning behaviour. In many courses it has more impact on learning than does teaching. Testing can be reliable, and even valid, and yet measure only the trivial and distorted learning which is an inevitable consequence of the nature of the testing (p.44).
Grades alone do not provide meaningful insight into what concepts students have retained over the course of a semester. They may also include measures such as participation that do not necessarily represent learning. The goal of assessment is to support students’ learning process and improve instructional practices.
Two types of assessment: formative and summative
There are two basic types of assessment:
Formative assessment occurs throughout the semester to monitor and support students’ learning. It is paired with constructive feedback to help students identify their strengths and weaknesses and encourages them as they move through the material. For this reason, it is not always graded and allows instructors to adjust their teaching strategy based on learners’ needs.
Examples:
- Questioning during a lecture
- Concept mapping
- Peer/self-evaluations
Summative assessment generally occurs at the end of a module, unit or course and is often high stakes. Its purpose is to measure students’ achievement of the learning outcomes.
Examples:
- Final exams
- Essays/ Papers
Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives
When determining the assessment strategy of a course, you may find it helpful to refer to Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives for the Cognitive Domain. It is important to note that the top three tiers of the taxonomy including creating, evaluating and analyzing promote higher order thinking.
If you have employed the taxonomy to formulate your learning outcomes for a course, then the evaluation strategy for each outcome should become apparent. This helps maintain alignment between the outcomes and the assessment and increases transparency between the teacher and students.
References
Anderson, L. W., Krathwohl, D. R., & Bloom, B. S. (2001). A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing: A revision of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives. New York: Longman.
Gibbs, G. (2006). How assessment frames student learning. In C. Bryan, & K. Clegg, Innovative assessment in higher education (pp. 23-36). London: Routledge .
Krathwohl, D. R. (2002). A revision of Bloom’s taxonomy: An overview. Theory into Practice, 41(4), 212-217.
Suskie, L. A. (2009). Assessing student learning: A common sense guide. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.