Assessment: A Refresher and Overview

1. What is assessment, anyway?

There is nothing more contentious, emotional, and impactful than assessment and evaluation. Tests, assignments, feedback, and grades are ubiquitous in schools, colleges, and universities, and for better or worse, our practices tend to be based on age-old tradition and habit. But this FLO Micro Course will challenge you to examine what we do and why we do it.  You will be encouraged to interrogate the practices we are all so familiar with, so we may better understand them, and ultimately improve them. Let's start unpacking some definitions.

Here is a nice definition from Barabara Walvoord, an assessment guru and professor at University of Notre Dame, Indiana: 

"Assessment and Evaluation is the systematic gathering of information about student learning and the factors that affect learning, undertaken with the resources, time, and expertise available, for the purpose of improving learning." 

This definition seems comprehensive and clear, but I am left asking the following questions:

• What information will be gathered?
• What student learning is targeted? How do you observe, study, and qualify/quantify this learning?
• What factors are you interested in? What factors can you hope to influence in this course?
• How much resources, time, and expertise is available?
• Is improving learning the only purpose?

STOP & THINK - How would you answer these questions about the assessment in your courses?

Walvoord also contends that assessment should end with action beyond just submitting scores or grades to the registrar!

STOP & THINK - Does all your assessment result in action? By whom?

But not all assessment definitions focus on learning. For some educators, it is understood that assessment and evaluation should be rigorous and accurate, and permit meaningful distinctions among students by applying a uniform standard of performance. It should be fair to students and candid to those who are entitled to information about students. 

This provides another perspective, one more focused on the summative aspect of assessment and evaluation. But again, I have questions:

• What do we mean when we say, "rigorous"? And, why are we so obsessed with rigor anyway? 
• When is it important to distinguish (or rank) student achievement, and when is it not?
• What constitutes "fair" assessment?

2. Why do we assess?

We do assessment and evaluation in higher education for a number of sometimes complimentary, and sometimes conflicting reasons. For better or worse, the following reasons may be behind the assessment in your programs and courses.

• To determine whether students have achieved the stated outcomes (pass/fail) and/or to what degree of competence/quality (graded).
• To measure a learner's growth/improvement throughout the course.
• To facilitate learning. In other words, the assessment task itself leads to learning (e.g. effortful recall and summarization implicit in a quiz).
• To motivate; to provide a reward or currency for work done
• To assign value to a task and show what is most important in the course.
• To incentivize certain behaviours (participation, attendance...etc.)
• To elicit something on which you can give meaningful feedback.
• To stream, sort, rank, and gate-keep (differentiating between students).
• To compare learner performance to the goals of the instruction. In other words, to assess the effectiveness of teaching methods.
• To give a program, course, or learning experience the perception of legitimacy.

STOP & THINK: Consider a course or program that you teach. Go through this list and think about the main reasons why assessment is used in your context. 

The way that assessment is primarily used often depends on the kind of course you teach, the students you serve, and the mission of the institution or program. It's actually hard to talk about assessment as one thing. Just think of the differences in how we learn, the needs of the learner, and the regulatory requirements between:

• large first year, content-driven courses and smaller 4th year courses that focus on application of knowledge
• 26 week foundation trades programs and 7-week apprenticeship training.
• up-grading programs, undergraduate degrees, and graduate-level courses.
• non-credit, continuing education courses and for-credit courses
• professional programs and general studies degrees. 

3. How we use assessment?

The purposes listed in the previous chapter are often categorized into three groups:

Assessment-of-learning - An evaluation of what has been learned or the quality of a performance, generally at the end of a learning period. Normally individual, but can be grouped. Generally conducted by an external agent (the instructor, expert, or audience, external exam). Generally represented by a numerical score, or summative symbol. Note, research shows that as soon as students get a grade, the learning often stops.

Assessment-for-learning - The kind of data gathering that helps direct future instructional or study decisions. Low-stakes evaluation to drive feedback and improve learning. 

Assessment-as-learning - Low and high stakes tasks that are given where the main goal is to promote learning through the doing of the task. An example includes the effortful recall and retrieval practice implicit on a test or quiz. Or whenever learning is improved through the completion of an assignment or doing a performance.  

You may also see assessment divided into these two types:

Formative Assessment - The goal of formative assessment is to gather feedback that can be used by the teacher or the students to guide improvements in the ongoing learning and teaching context.

Summative Evaluation - The goal of summative evaluation is to measure the level of success of proficiency that has been obtained, generally at the end of an instructional unit, measured against a pre-determined reference point. It's the point at which you "draw a line in the sand" and measure progress or achievement. It normally has some degree of weightiness or significance imposed on it by one or more stakeholders, such as a grade, a ranking with implications, a diagnosis, or an audience. 

4. Authenticity starts with outcomes

"Authentic assessment" is the concept-du-jour, so let's explore it. Most people agree that authentic assessment is the kind of assessment that measures knowledge and skills in a way that is meaningful, significant, and worthwhile. In other words, we want assessments that mimic the realities that students would experience "out there" beyond the classroom walls. And as designers of learning, we also have to ensure that assessments align with outcomes. Therefore, in order for assessment to be "authentic", the outcomes need to be meaningful, significant, and worthwhile as well. Unfortunately, we often don't have control over those outcomes. They are handed to us pre-approved by educational council or dictated by regulatory bodies. So, how do you do authentic assessment if the outcomes you are given are, in your opinion, not meaningful, significant, or worthwhile? 

Here's a tip. Transparency can go a long way. Consider providing an "assessment brief" or rationale with all summative assessments, even tests and exams. Answer these questions for your students with the assignment instructions in the syllabus or on the LMS: 

1. Why has this assignment, test, exam, performance...etc. been chosen as the tool for assessment?
2. What is it hoping to reveal? What evidence will it provide?
3. How does it connect to the outcomes of the course? 
4. How does it connect to the the discipline or field of work?
5. How does it contribute to and support learning in the course? 
6. How should you (the student) interpret the results or score? 
7. Why is it weighted the way it was weighted?  

CHALLENGE: Take one of the assessments in your course and see if you can write a paragraph rationale that answers these questions for students. 

5. More about "authenticity"

In the previous chapter you learned that authentic assessment is assessment that is meaningful, significant, and worthwhile. Let's explore this a little further. 

More practically speaking, we often identify something as authentic when the assessed task matches or is similar to what is done in the workplace or out in "real life".

For example, here are a list of assessment tasks that are generally considered to be authentic: 

• Work-integrated learning projects (e.g. students create and pitch a marketing plan to a real company who needs one);
• Demonstrated competency while on a practicum or preceptorship;
• Performances that are assessed by an audience or a panel (e.g. getting something published, winning a grant, presenting at a conference, exhibiting art, selling your work….etc);
• Lab reports and field notes submitted for grading;
• Building a professional portfolio;
• Completing a real task under defined conditions (e.g. writing a lesson plan; editing a report);
• Hackathons or maker fairs or problem-based challenges;
• Reflecting on experience in some format that aligns with how one might be required to reflect in the workplace or discipline;
• Teaching others or leading a workshop.

• Closed-book quizzes and exams
• Testing isolated skills
• Journaling, for the sake of journaling
• Essays (unless it's in a creative non-fiction program :-) 
• End of chapter questions

However, the whole point of education is to prepare people for the workplace (or "real life") by isolating competencies from their original context and breaking them into achievable chunks. Formal education, is by nature, a reductionist approach. As instructors, we take complex, real-world tasks and scaffold the component parts so students can learn them in a way that allows them to practice, fail, and gain capacity and confidence. And often, we find ourselves evaluating student performance and ability on the abstract knowledge and skills that we've isolated rather than the whole competency. This is how authentic can quickly become not-so-authentic! I find it helpful to think of "authentic" as being on a continuum. Context often determines how far up the authenticity continuum your assessment should be. 

Regardless of whether your course and assessment focuses more on the isolated skills and memorized content or the actual competency, it's important to be transparent about why that assessment approach has been chosen.

STOP & THINK: Consider the assessment in your course(s). Where does it fall on the authenticity continuum? Can you justify the inclusion of non-authentic tasks to your students? Is there a way to make your assessment more authentic?