Designing Assessments

Assessments, the mere mention of which often increases student’s stress level and has faculty predicting late nights as they complete the grading. Despite the anxiety associated with them, assessments play an incredibly important role in the teaching and learning process. They are the all-important time in a course when you become aware of what the student has learned from the experiences that you have provided and for you to reflect on how well students have met the learning outcomes for your course. Carefully designed assessments provide opportunities for students to showcase their learning and therefore become the all-important time when students discover how well they mastered the learning in the course.

Assessments that take place throughout a course are important tools in the teaching process providing you with valuable information about the gaps in students’ understanding and therefore in your teaching. Well designed assessments are also an important tool for students, providing them with a barometer of their own learning and therefore helping them to decide where to focus their attention and/or get help.

Designing quality assessments is a complex process. At their core assessments should be valid, fair, transparent and reliable. This means that an assessment should measure what is supposed to be measured, measure it at the appropriate level, be non-discriminatory, match student expectations, clearly outline how and what is being evaluated and be consistently repeatable. That’s not easy!

Ideally, you will also be providing multiple assessments within each course. It is always good practice to offer students more than one opportunity to display their learning within a specific course. Having one high-stake assessment at the end of a course does not provide either you or the student with enough information to guide learning throughout the course, and is unfair to both. Indeed, Centennial College’s Assessment and Exam Policy requires that no test shall be worth more than 25% of the final grade, unless with the permission of the program Chair.

It is also good practice to provide students with multiple ways to display their learning. If a course assessment scheme consists of a single type of assessment such as all tests or all written papers, a student who struggles with this particular type of assessment is severely disadvantaged. Varying the type of assessment within a course helps to overcome this barrier.

A traditional assessment scheme may include tests, written papers, presentations or projects that are submitted to the teacher for grading and returned to the students. However, an innovative approach to assessment may involve designing authentic assessments, those that require the students to engage with ‘real-world’ content, audiences and formats. These types of assignments are motivating to both the students and the faculty as they have inherent value and create learning that lasts well beyond the completion of the course.