4.1 Assessing Student Learning
After you design your course learning outcomes and module level objectives, your next step is to plan your assessments.
Assessments reveal a lot about your values as an educator. They show what you want to spend time thinking about and exploring with your students, as well as your own understanding of how students can express their learning.
Assessment design is often both invigorating and frustrating. What you want your students to create or achieve somehow needs to fit within the weeks of the term. Scoping and scaffolding assessments – deciding on the right amount of required work, the opportunity for student agency and choice, the order of assignments to help students meet a goal, and determining the necessary support they’ll need to get there – is a complex process.
When assessments are designed to be equitable, it means that they are designed to meet the needs of students who historically have been denied the learning opportunities, support, or access that is traditionally offered to students from dominant cultures and identities. As Sasha Costanza-Chock points out in Design Justice, “some people are always advantaged and others disadvantaged by any given design.” Importantly, “this distribution is influenced by intersecting structures of race, class, gender, and disability.” Costanza-Chock calls on educators to “prioritize design work that shifts advantages to those who are currently systemically disadvantaged within the matrix of domination,” or to become “design justice practitioners.” Equitable assessments deliberately shift design benefits to those groups who are disenfranchised by powerful social, economic, and political systems.
Types of Assessments
There are two types of assessment to keep in mind in your course design:
- Formative assessments: low stakes, frequent knowledge checks that allow students to test their understanding and receive feedback to improve their performance (for example: reflection questions with instructor or peer feedback, discussion forums, short quizzes with multiple attempts, no time limits, and automatic answer explanations)
- Summative assessments: projects that typically weigh more in the final grade and take place every few weeks over the course of the term to holistically measure student achievement of course learning outcomes
Assessment formats vary widely by school, department, and teaching community. Assessment formats might include creating a portfolio of work, a research paper, or an art project over the course of the term. They might include conducting experiments, proposing a marketing plan, or a writing a lab report. Assessments might be a live performance, a presentation, a script, or a video. Assessments also take shape in more traditional formats like exams or tests. It’s important to note that while exams are often convenient to administer, their validity, or their capacity to accurately measure student knowledge, can be quite limited.
To shift design benefits