Design Assessments for Learning Outcomes

Multiple choice questions often can鈥檛 tell an instructor everything they want to know about students鈥 learning. Thinking about what you, as an instructor, want to measure about student learning can help you design creative and authentic assessments to align with your learning objectives. 

Assessment is a term that tends to have a lot of baggage around it in education, and it can mean a couple of different things: measuring the efficacy of a degree program鈥檚 curriculum or measuring a student鈥檚 understanding of course material, for example.

Authentic assessment is a term, coined in part by , for assessments that are tightly aligned with the learning objectives of a course or learning experience and have learners working on 鈥渞eal world鈥 problems. Authentic assessments usually have more than one 鈥渃orrect鈥 answer but can be evaluated using a rubric that provides assurance that the data obtained from the assessment is valid.

  • In his essay, 鈥淭he Case for Authentic Assessment鈥, Wiggins compares authentic assessments to traditional standardized tests. Although that direct comparison isn鈥檛 necessarily relevant in most higher education courses, we can pull some key traits of authentic assessments from that comparison. Authentic assessments

    • Require students to perform, in a real world (or simulated real-world) context, all of the tasks an adult or professional would engage in to apply what they鈥檝e learned.
    • Involve open-ended and ill-structured problems.
    • Require learners to adopt a role to 鈥渞ehearse for the complex ambiguities of the 鈥榞ame鈥 of adult and professional life.鈥
    • Require learners to justify their answer as well as the process they used to decide on that answer.
    • Are realistic, in that they aren鈥檛 timed, allow learners to use resources that would be available to them.
  • Using authentic assessments can require more effort and planning on the part of the instructor. Despite that increase in effort, both learners and instructors can benefit when a course uses authentic assessments. One of the benefits that applies to both learners and instructors is the increase in interest and engagement in the task. For instructors, it is much more interesting to explore and evaluate an array of different answers and approaches (and can be educational for the instructor, too). Learners have more motivation to work on the assessment: it is novel, creates a direct connection between the assessment and the 鈥渞eal鈥 world, and clearly demonstrates to the learner how much they鈥檝e learned and where they still have room to grow (i.e. authentic assessments are much more transparent to the learner).

    Other benefits for instructors include an increased awareness of what students鈥 strengths and areas for growth are (both with respect to individual students and the collective), and an opportunity to connect with each individual learner. Since authentic assessments are directly tied to learning objectives, an instructor knows, with less ambiguity, what objectives students are meeting and which ones they are not. With authentic assessments, instructors get to connect with learners as they see the unique approaches each individual learner uses to solve the ill-structured problem. Many instructors teaching online value every opportunity to connect with learners they may never interact with face-to-face.

    In addition to being more engaging, authentic assessments are usually more equitable for the diverse learners in a course. The design and selection of multiple-choice questions can include implicit biases that disadvantage some learners. Because authentic assessments are more transparent, don鈥檛 have a single right answer and require learners to justify their process and their answer, every learner has an opportunity to ask questions, identify and use resources, and 鈥渕ake their case鈥 as to how their answer demonstrates their learning.

  • Because authentic assessments are tied directly to the learning objectives of a course, program, or discipline, the examples provided here are of general categories/types of authentic assessments.

    • Case studies
    • Simulations (many role-playing simulations can be used online)
    • Writing to a real audience 鈥 for example, a policy brief that might be shared with a legislator, or writing a pamphlet geared toward a lay audience.
    • Community-partnered research or project development
  • The key to grading authentic assessments is to have a rubric that keeps the grader鈥檚 focus on the most important standards you want learners to meet. The Online Teaching at Michigan site has a guide on creating and using rubrics. 

    Practical Tips:

    • The first step to creating an authentic assessment is to write learning objectives that describe how learners will demonstrate their learning.
    • If you typically use essays for assessing student learning, frame the writing assignment for an audience other than the instructor/instructional team, and ideally, find individuals who are part of that audience to provide feedback to the learners.
    • Have students reflect on their own academic performance on each assessment. Having them identify their own misconceptions and mistakes enhances their learning, helps to develop their metacognitive abilities, and is representative of what a professional must do when they err.
    • Have students create a lightweight portfolio where they reflect on what they learned from each assignment (either through making mistakes or by engaging in the learning that occurs when someone is assessed).
    • Explore libraries of case studies online (e.g. , National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science, and the )
  • The team at DLI has created Assessment Strategies in D2L which presents various methods for delivering assessments in the D2L environment. This is a 15-minute, interactive lesson, designed to provide course developers with an overview of how to utilize the functions in D2L to gauge learner mastery. Faculty developers should use this lesson as a starting point before designing assessments inside D2L for their online, hybrid, or other course using D2L to deliver assessments. The lesson should guide developers in the planning, organizing, and structuring of learner assessments. One of the highlights of the lesson is demonstrating how to sort assessment questions based on mastery level. Skillful segregation and re-distribution of assessment questions can ensure that tests include an equitable distribution of question types.

 

Other Assessment Techniques

 from Carnegie Mellon University Eberly Center

 from Carnegie Mellon University Eberly Center

 from Eduflow

 from The Chronicle of Higher Education

Terms of Use: This work was adapted and is licensed under a . It is attributed to the University of Michigan Center for Academic Innovation and the original version is called 

Resources/References

SEAS- 

Indiana University 鈥 

University of Buffalo 鈥 National center for case study teaching in science: Case types & methods

Columbia University 鈥 

Wiggins, G. (1989). A true test: Toward more authentic and equitable assessment. The Phi Delta Kappan, 70(9), 703-713. Retrieved May 19, 2020, from .

Wiggins, G. (1990). The case for authentic assessment. Practical Assessment, Research, and Evaluation, 2(2). Retrieved May 18, 2020.

Williams, J.B. (2004). Creating authentic assessments: A method for the authoring of open book open web examinations. In R. Atkinson, C. McBeath, D. Jonas-Dwyer & R. Phillips (Eds), Beyond the comfort zone: Proceedings of the 21st ASCILITE Conference (pp. 934-937). Perth, 5-8 December.