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Planning Assessment That Reflects Goals
It's never too early to think about assessing student learning. As you are planning your course, you will begin by thinking about the learning goals you have for your students. What do you want them to learn in the course? What knowledge will they gain during the course? What skills will they acquire? How will their thinking be different? What will they be able to do?Once you have articulated those goals, the next question you have to ask yourself is, How will I know if they have achieved those goals? How will they know? This is where assessment comes in.
Educators often stress "authentic" assessment, by which they mean continuously monitoring student performance by seeing what students know or can do while they are learning. These kinds of assessments often involve process skills and are informal, designed to provide ready feedback to both student and teacher. Examples are contained in Angelo and Cross's Classroom Assessment Techniques (1993). Students, for example, might be invited to apply a category system to a set of data to see if they understand how to do this; they might be asked to list the main reasons why a certain problem could not be solved using a given procedure to see if they realize the limitations; or they may be asked to keep a portfolio of their written work and comment on their progress periodically. All of these procedures are designed to be natural tests of the learning goals for the purpose of improvement.
Unfortunately, assessment is more often used only to justify the assignment of letter grades than to serve as a diagnostic tool. As Svinicki (1976) points out, there are at least two kinds of occasions when assessment for diagnosis is important. One is at the beginning of a course or a given segment of a course, when it is appropriate to assess what the learners already know about what is to be learned. At these times, a pretest can help the instructor know the strengths and weaknesses of the learners and can suggest ways to modify learning activities accordingly. Another use of diagnostic assessment is the administration of frequent short self-tests to enable students to judge their performance while they are learning. If constructed in such a way that the tests force students to become more aware of the thinking process they use, diagnostic tests can help students develop their skills. These tests can also provide the kind of rapid and frequent feedback that is so important to learning.
Methods of evaluation and grading are closely tied to an instructor's own personal philosophy regarding teaching. Consistent with this, it may be useful, in advance, to consider factors that will influence instructors' evaluation of students. For example, some instructors make use of the threat of unannounced quizzes to motivate students, while others intentionally do not. Some instructors weigh content more heavily than style. It has been suggested that lower (or higher) grades should be used as a tool to motivate students. Other instructors may use tests diagnostically, administering them during the quarter without grades and using them to plan future class activities. Extra credit options are sometimes offered when requested by students or deemed appropriate by instructors. Some instructors negotiate with students about the methods of evaluation, while others do not. Class participation may be valued more highly in some classes than in others. These and other issues directly affect the instructor's evaluation of student performance. As personal preference is so much a part of the grading and evaluating of students, a thoughtful examination of one's own personal philosophy concerning these issues will be very useful. Once you have clarified for yourself what your philosophy is, it's also important to make your philosophy and methods of evaluation and grading explicit to your students.
Regardless of which purpose is intended, assessment should be be tied to your desired learning outcomes for students. In some cases these outcomes or objectives will be provided for an instructor. If a course is part of a curricular sequence, if it is the prerequisite for another class, many of the items students must learn will be determined in the curriculum planning process. The syllabus for courses and sections taught by teaching associates is also often (although not always) provided by the department or supervising professor rather than determined by each TA.
Whether the learning objectives are developed by the instructor or provided by another, it is important that the instructor be very clear what these outcomes are. It is very difficult to judge performance if one cannot describe success; it is likewise difficult for students to achieve success if they do not know the target.
Once the desired outcomes are clear, effective assessment tools can be developed to determine student achievement. Different kinds of assessments are appropriate in different settings and for different purposes. Performance assessment is very important where the learning goals involve the acquisition of skills that can be demonstrated through action. In areas such as music, theater, art, dance, medicine, and physical education, much of the learning will be demonstrated through assessment of actual performance. Papers and other assignments are also methods for assessing student achievement. Examinations can come in many formats: essay, multiple choice; paper and pencil; online, take-home, in-class; etc.
In their book Effective Grading, Walvoord and Anderson (1998) offer six guidelines for creating assignments worth grading that are useful to keep in mind as you design your own assessments:
- Begin by considering what you want your students to learn.
- Select tests and assignments that both teach and test the learning you value most.
- Construct a course outline that shows the nature and sequence of major tests and assignments.
- Check that the tests and assignments fit your learning goals and are feasible in terms of workload.
- Collaborate with your students to set and achieve goals.
- Give students explicit directions for their assignments.
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