Gagné’s Events 6, 7, and 8 highlight important principles about learner-centred assessment. Event 6 is about giving your learners the opportunity to practice newly acquired skills and self-assess their understanding of new concepts.

Closely related in practice, Event 7 asks you to think about how you can provide timely and relevant feedback to learners, to help them identify gaps in their knowledge and understanding, and keep them on track. Providing feedback will be discussed in detail in Section 2.5, alongside Event 8, assessing performance.

Use a variety of assessment types

Online teaching provides opportunities to introduce new types of assessments into your course. Tools like discussion boards and course chats, which allow for synchronous and asynchronous engagement, help to build a learning community in the course. Active learning, where learners are engaged in the learning process to think critically about course content, leads to greater understanding. Providing options for assessment, which offer learners agency over how they want to be assessed and allow them to tap into their own goals and interests, has been shown to increase learner engagement and persistence (Nilson & Goodson, 2018) and is an important part of Universal Design for Learning (UDL). These strategies all reflect a learner-centred approach to teaching and learning, which helps to build learner investment in the course.

Provide multiple means of action and expression

As CAST describes, “Learners differ in the ways that they can navigate a learning environment and express what they know.” To account for these differences, they recommend providing learners with options for action and expression (CAST, 2018). When thinking about assessments, consider

• providing ample opportunities for students to seek and receive feedback (see 2.5 Providing feedback/feedforward and assessing performance),
• building transparent rubrics and grading frameworks (see 2.5 Providing feedback/feedforward and assessing performance),
• inviting activity and assessment submission through multiple means, and
• providing scaffolds to help learners practice and gain knowledge (see Use Scaffolded Assessments in this section).

Examples of each of these strategies and more are available on CAST’s UDL Guidelines site on the Provide Multiple Means of Action & Expression page.

For more ideas about how to increase the accessibility of assessments, see An EDII Perspective: Quick Tips for More Accessible Assessments below.

Strategies for choosing activities and assessments that develop specific skills

A useful approach for determining which types of assessment to include in your course is to think about the skills you want your learners to develop by the end of your course. Be sure to choose assessments that are a good match for the skills outlined in your learning outcomes (Barber et al., 2020). The following table lists skill areas and example assessments that would be appropriate for assessing those skills:

Note: Examples of skill areas and summative assessments adapted from The New Roadmap for Creating Online Courses by C. R. Barber, J. K. McCollum, and W. L. Maboudian, 2020, p. 80. Copyright 2020 by Cambridge University Press.

In addition to ensuring that your assessments are effective at evaluating skills targeted in your learning outcomes, think about whether they are at the appropriate level of cognition for your course. Bloom’s taxonomy includes the following levels of cognitive domain assessment:

• • high levels of comprehension: These questions typically ask learners to evaluate (make judgements based on evidence found) or create (compile information to create new solutions).
  • mid levels of comprehension: These questions typically ask learners to apply and/or analyze items/scenarios.
  • basic comprehension: These questions typically ask learners to be able to identify, describe, or translate knowledge (compare, classify, etc.).

Next, we turn our attention to a key strategy in designing learner-centred activities and assessments: scaffolding.

Use scaffolded assessments

Scaffolding activities and assessments involves breaking up complicated tasks and content into more manageable parts of gradually increasing complexity, with feedback provided at each step.

Why scaffolding matters

Scaffolding engages learners at deeper levels of learning (Sotiriadou et al., 2020; Clark and Graves, 2005) and helps to reduce their anxiety about higher-stakes assessments. Learners benefit from instructor feedback at each stage of the assignment or task, helping them better understand expectations, while instructors can see what part of the process might be challenging for learners and adjust accordingly. By breaking down tasks into discrete parts, scaffolding helps to lower the stakes of an assessment—which is one way to reduce cheating behaviours.

Strategies for scaffolding

Consider how smaller assessments (or components of the final assignment) may be incorporated into your grading scheme so that learners can receive and respond to feedback throughout the course.

For example:

Examples of how scaffolding could work

Use authentic assessments

Authentic assessments resemble real-life, application-based tasks. This assessment method is often contrasted with traditional assessments like tests, which may not have real-life application. Authentic assessments ask learners to apply discipline-specific skills and knowledge to solve real-world scenarios and/or case studies involving higher-order thinking skills, judgement, and innovation.

Why authentic assessment matters

Authentic assessments have emerged alongside other career-focused learning, like work placements, in an effort to “improve graduate employability” (James & Casidy, 2018; Sotiriadou et al., 2020). As Sotiriadou et al. (2020) note, “university educators have responded by placing a bigger focus on authentic learning activities and authentic assessment, so that students develop the skills and practices that they will need in their future careers.”

By requiring that learners “do” the subject, authentic assessments not only assess learning, but also help learners to improve their understanding of course content and their skills in applying what they’ve learned.

When considering your assessments, think of ways to build in application-based assignments. Research shows that learners respond well to authentic assessments, and these types of assignments tend to decrease academic misconduct in courses (Sotiriadou et al., 2020; Way et al., 2020).

A (meta)example of authentic assessment

Strategies for authentic assessment

Design authentic assessments by using application-based questions, case studies, and industry-specific scenarios. Consider the following:

• real-world scenarios / problem-solving
  • provide learners with real-world problems where they need to demonstrate mastery of course principles and concepts in solving the issue presented (e.g., “How would you solve…”, “Propose a solution to…”, “Indicate how you would design…”);
  • provide learners with assessments linked to the “external world” (Villarroel et al., 2019, p. 44), including allowing for open-book tests, collaborative answers for complex tests, and assessments that simulate realistic professional environments.
• response requirements
  • direct learners to provide their solution and indicate the concepts/principles they used to formulate their solutions (i.e., “why” they are proposing the solution).
• build varying levels of difficulty
  • obtain a more accurate representation of the different levels of mastery amongst your learners by including questions with varying levels of complexity. Including questions at different levels for the various learning outcomes of your course will help ensure your assessment provides the most accurate evaluation possible.

Examples of how authentic assessment could work