Over the past two decades, colleges and universities across the United States have faced increased demands to show evidence that students are meeting appropriate educational goals. Designing and implementing assessments at the course level is quite instrumental in ensuring that students are not just learning the material, but also providing important information to instructors on the extent of the progress students are making in attaining the intended learning outcomes of the course.
A formal process of assessing a course can help instructors effectively facilitate student learning by:
a) Promoting a clearer and better comprehension of course expectations for their work and how the quality of their work will be evaluated
b) Ensuring clarity regarding teaching goals and what students are expected to learn
c) Cultivating student engagement in their own learning
d) Fostering effective communication and feedback with students
e) Providing increased information about student learning in the classroom, leading to adjustments in pedagogical styles as the course progresses.
WHAT do you want students to KNOW and DO upon completion of your course?
HOW will you know if they get there?
There are various practical and authentic assessment strategies and tools that can help faculty create or fine-tune assessment to better determine the degree to which students are learning in your class. On this page, we chare several assessment options you may consider applying to your class in addition to using Quiz tools in Canvas.
Developing strategies for promoting student engagement online during the ongoing pandemic is difficult. However, there are ways to continue deeper learning and engagement despite these challenges such as maintaining constant communication, listening to and (where possible) accommodating student needs, creating a welcoming atmosphere, building strong relationships with students and, offering both synchronous and asynchronous learning opportunities as a means to ensuring equity.
Peer assessment (or “peer review”) is mostly used as a technique for students to assess their fellow students’ work. This typically involves students evaluating and providing feedback to their peers using a rubric or a set of assessment criteria. A well-designed peer assessment process can potentially lead to increase in student motivation and engagement, and help students in development of self-awareness, reflecting on the feedback and enhancing the quality of their own work.
The remote teaching and learning process can be very beneficial if students are engaged and active. One of the strategies to accomplish this is to use brief, more regular assessments such as collaborative projects, weekly writing assignments, short problem sets or quizzes as they provide students a much better and firm foundational knowledge and practice with the planned course materials particularly at this time when high stakes assessments/examinations are not optimal. If you are considering to use low stakes assessments, ensure that objectives of the assessments/assignments are guided by your course student learning outcomes.
Whether required for individual students or required as a group, research projects/term papers of a variety of lengths and complexity work well in a remote learning environment. Given that students develop research papers/projects throughout the semester, requiring them to submit portions of the project (e.g., the introduction and thesis, the literature review) at different times can be quite beneficial in ensuring quality of the project. In addition, grading each portion of the project separately using a rubric and providing feedback to students not only helps them refine aspects of the project, but also minimizes the possibility that students will be able to plagiarize work.
In addition to the above recommendations, please take a look at the assessment resources available in Canvas as they may be very helpful as you develop or refine assessment plan for your course.
