Learn about and share various methods of learning assessment
Assessment is crucial, pedagogically and politically. Pedagogically, students must of course be given feedback about their mastery of course material. Politically, assessment is gaining increasing prominence as the link between financial inputs and learning outcomes at an institution. For both these reasons, helping teachers pay close attention to how they assess student's learning can be an important part of a faculty developer's job.
Note: As
with any aspect of their teaching, how a teacher assesses their students'
learning is a personal decision. Teaching is an act of personal expression.
Therefore, as exciting as new assessment strategies might be for you,
it is important in discussion to move at each instructor's unique pace
and make sure that they own their class, every step of the way.
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The purpose of assessment
When many people teach for the first time, they "go with what they know"--they mimic the course structure and instructional behavior they learned from their own teachers over the years. They lecture, assign homework, hold class discussions, give exams. You and I were probably no different. Only after we started to develop our own teaching style did we begin to question the role of each of these activities--and their effectiveness.
Assessment can too often feel like a punitive experience to our students: the mid-term or final is when they feel they must do penance for not having paid better attention, taken better notes or studied that extra hour. Graded papers or lab experiments are frequently returned long after they are turned in, disconnecting effort from results in the students' minds and undermining their instructional value.
Things need not be this way. When used with the purpose of creating greater teacher-student dialogue, learning assessments can in fact evoke greater student interest, energy and engagement.
In Creating Significant Learning Experiences, Fink recommends feedback that is:
• Frequent: Give feedback daily, weekly, or as frequently as possible.
• Immediate: Get the feedback to students as soon as possible.
• Discriminating: Make clear what the difference is between poor, acceptable, and exceptional work.
• Loving: Be empathetic in the way you deliver your feedback.(The word "loving" might be a tough sell to some faculty, so I sometimes use "empathetic" instead.)
Frequent, Immediate, Discriminating and Loving feedback does not mean hugs and a long exam every week--it can be a handful of team-based multiple-choice questions used to kick off every class session, or every other class session. Correct answers and discussion can ensue, after which class can proceed as usual. There are many ways to turn assessment into an energizing force; many ways to give feedback that is frequent, immediate, discriminating and loving.
As a warning, some faculty might not be ready for the changing power-relationship that more dynamic assessment practices can create. As a teacher becomes more responsive to and engaged with his/her students, the students may become less willing to accept "because I said so" (stated or implied) as a rationale for why a test question is right or wrong. Assessment is where the power relationship between teacher and student can be most starkly drawn, and some teachers prefer to maintain a significant authoritarian remove from their students. Consider framing this as an issue of "readiness" on the part of the instructor, not a permanent aspect of their character.
Creating effective assessments
Assessment consists of asking our students to say or do something that demonstrates their mastery of course content. Quizzes, exams, papers and problem sets are all traditional assessment methods, and many fields have specialized assessment methods (e.g., speeches and labs). Since the written test as an assessment method cuts across most fields, it is likely the one you will deal with most frequently.
Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives
Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives describes different kinds of thinking and has become a classic tool for helping to write good test questions. Valdosta State University has a concise web page
As a faculty developer, beware the limits of applying Bloom's Taxonomy if a teacher brings you an exam and asks for your opinion about it. If you do not know how course material is presented to students, it is difficult to determine what cognitive activity a test question requires. For example, if a teacher lectures in detail upon the difficult relationship between "ethnographic methods" and "conversation analysis methods," describing that difficult relationship on an exam may simply require basic factual recall. But if the two methods are presented separately and their conflicting assumptions are never (or barely) addressed in class, then describing their relationship could demand analytical and evaluative thinking far beyond simple recall.
Other assessment resources
Individual consultation and hands-on workshops are good places to target effective assessment methods. Frequently, teachers need to work with someone else while they learn this particular kind of creativity. A fantastic step-by-step guide for creating an exam can be found at the University of Texas' Test Construction: Some Practical Ideas
Don't underestimate the power of Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs)
Again, as important as the assessment itself is how the teacher uses that assessment in class. Is the assessment a binge-and-purge monolithic mid-term upon which half their grade is based and for which there is no follow-up? Or is it intended to draw the students meaningfully deeper into the course material and to reinforce their understandings?
Matching assessment to learning objectives
Assessment integrity is based upon how well assessments in a course match the course's stated learning objectives. We promise our students that we will teach them certain things in our learning objectives and we use assessments to measure how well we live up to that promise. But what if our assessments are measuring different things than we are trying to teach? Such a gap can explain a great deal of student and teacher frustration, and closing that gap can be very satisfying.
Determining the assessment integrity of a course requires review of the assessments used in the course as well as collaboration with the instructor (to provide and explain the materials). As you look over each assessment, keep the course's learning objectives in mind and ask yourself "what is this assessment asking me to know?" If the answer to that question strays from being clearly associated with any one of the stated learning objectives, then that assessment might need some attention. Perhaps some questions need to be rewritten or a paper assignment should be pulled into better focus.
Once you have determined how you feel each assessment addresses (or does not address) the course's stated learning objectives, you can present your results in a simple grid. Identify the course's learning objectives and then determine which assessments in the course actually measure student learning in line with those objectives. For example:
Learning Objectives Describe two major theoretical approaches to ethnography.
Given a set of desired outcomes, identify the best ethnographic approach to a situation.
Conduct an ethnographic study of a new environment
Learn teamwork and peer-feedback skills As you can see, every assessment need not target every learning objective. An assessment without a learning objective (or a learning objective without and assessment) will appear clearly here and draw the teacher's attention.