Designing Assessments

Paying careful attention to how we assess students offers us the opportunity to build assessments that effectively measure student learning and to reflect on the assessment choices that we make.

In a well aligned course, the course outcomes, learning objectives, materials, activities, and assessments should work together to help students meet their learning goals. When planning, the first thing to do is to review your course outline. The outcomes, objectives, and evaluations will inform what students will have to know or do in your class and will define what students should be assessed on and how they should be evaluated. With your outcomes and objectives in mind, take some time to think about assessments you might work with and how those choices position assessment within your course.

First, consider the course(s) that you’re teaching with respect to what assessment might look like and give some thought to:

• What are the typical assessments that you might use in the course you’re developing?
• What do you like about these assessments? Why would you use them?
• In what ways are they challenging? Do you have any concerns?

Next, take a few minutes to reflect on the choices that you’ve made:

• What type of skill do your assessments typically emphasize (writing, physical, etc.)? Why?
• What type of learner does that reward?
• What type of learner might struggle with these assessments?

If you find that your assessments privilege particular types of skills or students, it would be helpful to consider whether assessments can offer a few different ways for students to demonstrate their knowledge and learning. [Link to UDL section]

Review Course Learning Goals and Objectives

To start building assessments for your course, start by referring to and reflecting on your course outcomes and objectives, which may give a clear indication of the kinds of assessments that are appropriate and what they should be measuring. The trick in choosing an appropriate assessment for learning outcomes is to look at the action word. For instance, if an outcome begins with the word “write”, it is likely that you will need to consider evaluating students on a paper, essay, report, or other written document.

As you’re planning your assessments, consider the following:

• What action verbs did you use in your outcomes and objectives?
• How can you create assessments that allow students to demonstrate meeting those outcomes or objectives?
• Is that activity at an appropriate level for this course?

Referring to Bloom’s taxonomy may help you to answer the above questions.

Next, think about what assessments would best demonstrate student achievements of the course outcomes and objectives. Start by thinking about what the most ideal assessments in your course would be and how you would assess students if you were not concerned about factors like grading time, mode of delivery, or resources. Give some thought to:

• What would be acceptable evidence that students have learned?
• What assessments would you give to students, in an ideal world?
• How and when would they be delivered?
• What constraints are holding you back?

Get the Tool!

Using the Ideal Assessment Plan Template, plot out the assessments in your course and draw out the connections between them. Use the 14-week table at the bottom to plan out when different assessments will occur across the term.

UDL and Assessments

Please take a moment to review an introductory video to UDL and assessment developed by UDL on campus. This video will highlight the difference between construct relevant and construct irrelevant factors when designing assessments to measure learning outcomes.

As discussed in the video, when designing your assessments, it is important to consider the construct relevant and irrelevant factors of the assessments. This will help to support you to minimize the creation of unintentional barriers for students demonstrating their learning.

Construct relevance refers to the factors (e.g., mode of presentation or response) that are related to the construct (the concept or the characteristics) that the test is intended to measure.

Construct irrelevance is the extent to which test scores are influenced by factors (e.g., mode of presentation or response) that are not related to the construct (the concept or the characteristics) that the test is intended to measure.

By being aware that assessments inherently contain barriers, you can proactively develop multiple supports and assessment options to help students navigate around barriers that may exist in your assessments.

Supports for students could include:

• text to speech technology so that reading ability is not being measured in an assessment of content knowledge in mathematics;
• speech to text technology so that motor coordination skills are not assessed on a task where that is irrelevant; and
• extended assessment times to reduce the barriers presented by a timed assessment when response fluency is not critical are all options that could be considered.

Assessment options and multiple pathways for students to demonstrate their understanding of a course learning outcome could include allowing students to give a presentation, write an essay, or develop a portfolio to demonstrate their knowledge.

Additional information on assessments that support UDL can be found in module 5 of this course.

Ten Key Ideas

While there are many types of assessments that you can use in your course for different purposes, Maureen Wideman, Ruth Rodgers, and Karen Hodgins have developed some central principles that it’s helpful to keep in mind as you’re working on selecting and designing assessments. Keeping these ideas in mind will help you to develop assessments that accurately evaluate what students have learned and that will support them in showing their capabilities. Expand the row below to review the ten key ideas for selecting and designing assessments.

In the next section we’ll explore two important assessment types: formative and summative.

References

Wideman, M., Rodgers, R. and Hodgins K. (2014). College Educator Development Program, Centre for Teaching and Learning, Durham College and UOIT. http://www.collegeeducator.ca