Define Your Assessment
Type of Assessment
In defining your assessment, one thing you should have in mind is the sort of assessment you are planning for. Here are three possibilities:
- A formative assessment is used to provide ongoing feedback and guidance to your students as they are learning a concept. They may or may not be graded.
- A summative assessment is used at the end of a unit or course to evaluate whether students achieved the desired objectives. These are usually graded.
- A combination of both formative and summative assessments that balance the process and product of learning. This is usually scaffolded, meaning that students are guided to complete the assessment in steps and provided low stakes feedback along the way so that their final submission can respond to the feedback and capture their performance.
Your Assessment
It’s time to combine the previous things you have explored: the course learning objective(s) that you want the assessment to evaluate, the alternative assessments that caught your interest, and how GenAI may assist students in completing the task to define your assessment.
You can think of those three components in the following way:
- The learning objective is the WHY (the goal);
- The alternative assessment is the WHAT (the deliverable format);
- The GenAI integration is the HOW (the task or data that must be integrated in the deliverable).
At this point, you want a general overview of the assessment – a description that is a couple of sentences. We will flesh out each component in later steps.
For example, consider a situation where your learning objective is for students to be able to tell apart what is science from other approaches to knowledge. The alternative assessment that caught your eye was a concept map because you want students to create links between concepts as they consider the characteristics of science knowledge. How might you integrate GenAI into this assignment? Here are a few options to consider:
- Students give a GenAI chatbot the following prompt: “Give me a list of 25 words or concepts associated with scientific knowledge and process.” Students then must use the 25 words/concepts they are provided and arrange them into a coherent concept map that links concepts appropriately (to show their relationship).
- Students create a concept map of what science is and how science works. For each concept, students must add at least two examples. Students are invited to use a GenAI tool to research and evaluate examples. They are responsible for choosing illustrative ones that showcase the concept clearly and succinctly.
- Students have to create a flowchart that another person could use to interrogate themselves as to whether a form of knowledge is scientific. The flowchart will ask Yes/No questions and, depending on the response, the flowchart helps the person identify the type of knowledge that they are starting with. Students can use ChatGPT or other GenAI tools to formulate the questions in their