Assessing the different kinds of learning

1. Psychomotor and Process Skills

If you have any outcomes that require students to learn how to do something, then you’ll need to assess these skills. Skills include things like butchering a chicken, writing a paper, completing a math or physics problem, and building a set of stairs. We often think of skills as being something separate and distinct from knowledge, but actually they work together. All skills have a thinking component and all thinking has a skills component. 

All courses require students to use and showcase their skills in some way, whether explicit or not. Skills can:

• Be simple, physical, automatic movements (hammering nails, cutting vegetables, giving an injection)
• Require cognitive processing, decision making, and memory (using tools safely, formatting a document, completing a math problem)
• Help students develop understanding and contribute to the learning (conducting research, asking good questions, reflecting and sense-making)
• Be necessary a condition for students to demonstrate understanding (test-taking, essay writing, presenting, verbal articulation).
• Require a complex interplay of thinking and doing (driving a car, building something)

If skill falls on a continuum, then the far end of that continuum is mastery, or expert performance. When you are thinking about the dimensions of mastery and how you're going to describe expected performance in your course, the following considerations might be important: 

• Accuracy
• Speed
• Consistency
• Confidence
• Independence 
• Knowing which skill to use in different situations
• Ability to read the cues in a situation to modify or improvise if needed.

When designing an assessment brief for the evaluation of psychomotor or process skills, provide students a clear description of expected performance. This is best done through conversation about mastery and quality with students. Construct rubrics with students and give students opportunities to see multiple examples of expected performance. 

STOP & THINK – Think about the skills you explicitly teach and those that are presumed in your course. What aspects of mastery (from the list above) are most important to measure/evaluate and under what conditions? What kind of task can you design to give students the chance to show you what they can do? 

2. Performances and Products

Many courses ask students to complete assignments in order to showcase their knowledge and skills. You might ask students to:

• Write something (essay, story, poem, letter, research paper)
• Complete a discipline-related project
• Create a poster presentation or build a website
• Give an oral presentation
• Design and produce an artifact
• Perform something in front of an audience
• Contribute a real solution to a real problem in the real world (non-disposable assignments)
• Design and teach a lesson

These can be rich tasks that require the application of multiple skills and pieces of knowledge. They are a great opportunity to facilitate authentic experiences that mimic what students would do in the workplace or "real world". Sometimes they are given as group projects in order to add collaboration and teamwork to the mix. However, if the main purpose of the assignment is to assess individual competence against an outcome, then you need to be careful about evaluating the entire group as one. 

If you choose to give an assignment like this, you should be clear about what learning and/or ability that task is supposed to reveal and what you hope your students will gain from completing this task. 

These kinds of assignments almost always require a well-developed rubric in order to make clear the expectations of quality for the various components, and to show the weighting of those components.  Rubrics are best created with students and with a range of examples of quality for them to look at. 

You need to be really clear about the purpose of the task you put in front of students. If you've always included an oral presentation in your course, why? What if a student had extreme performance anxiety which impacted his/her ability to showcase what they know? Could they build a website instead? Or, is the act of giving an oral presentation the more important thing?  

STOP & THINK - Do you include assignments like those listed above in your courses? Are you using them more as a learning tool or a test of competency? What kinds of things might you do to equip your students for success? Is there room for flexibility or negotiation in this assignment? Think of an assignment you've given and identify 2-3 main criteria that you would assess through this task. In other words, what is this task actually revealing?

3. Thinking

What if you want to teach thinking skills in your course? Do any of your course outcomes focus on making judgments, comparing and contrasting, categorizing, analyzing a case study, asking questions, justifying an argument, identifying cause and effect, reading critically, recognizing assumptions and bias (own and others), creating new solutions...etc.?

If so, you'll need to design a task that has students demonstrate these thinking skills. The first step is to articulate what thinking skills you want to focus on. Are they represented in the outcomes? Do you explicitly teach them in your course, or just assume students already have them?

Here are some tips to consider if thinking skills are important in your course:

• If you are going to assess thinking skills, then make sure you give students plenty of opportunity to practice them, both freely and in low-stakes testing conditions. 
• Thinking skills lend themselves well to self-evaluation. Ideally, you want students who are self-aware of their abilities and limitations when it comes to thinking. 
• Perhaps you want to do a TRIZ (www.liberatingstructures.com) exercise with you students first and ask the question, "What does lazy, simple, biased, inaccurate thinking look like and feel like?"
• Model good thinking and be explicit about what makes it good thinking. 

Here are two resources to support your assessment of thinking skills:

1. Harvard School of Education Project Zero's Thinking Routines Tool Box
2. University of Waterloo's Promoting and Assessing Critical Thinking

STOP & THINK - Does your course emphasize thinking skills? If so, identify 2-3 of them (from the list above) and think about why they are important in the context of your course? How do you equip and empower your students to be successful thinkers? What tasks would suit the assessment of thinking in your course? How will you describe the degrees of quality of thinking?

4. Reflection and journaling

Experiential learning is a powerful approach that leads to transformation. But what and how do you assess the learning that comes from experience?

The role of the instructor in experiential learning is to set-up the disciplinary encounter/experience, facilitate reflection, and then get students to construct new learning. Instructors also need to track this process by getting students to articulate the transformation. Journaling or writing learning logs are a great way to do this.  

But what exactly do you evaluate? Possibilities include:

• Quality of description of experience - this keeps students accountable to participate. It also develops the 'art of noticing'.
• Quality of reflection on the experience - what connections are made between experience and course concepts (are they accurate, insightful, and nuanced)?
• Amount of learning that has taken place - articulation of new thinking and growth; identification of learning gaps; application of this learning into life.
• Skills of Journal Writing - writing, drawing, communicating, representing
• Completion - done or not done

When designing a journal assignment, you'll need to give students plenty of support or scaffolds. These are not "Dear Diary" free writes! The following things are useful to provide in your instructions to students:

• Why are you having them write a journal? How will it help them?
• How often students should use them. Don't assume that everyone is naturally inclined and motivated to jot down their thinking after an experience. 
• Question prompts.
• Approximate word counts
• How they should be formatted and presented
• How a student can access feedback
• Scoring guide 

Many articles that have been written about assessing reflection and I curated a few here: Articles

5. Learner Behaviour and Student "Labour"

Should you assess participation and labor/effort (and other behaviours you deem important)?

This question comes up all the time. That's because we believe participation and effort will improve the chances of student success, and we want our students to succeed.

Firstly, in defense of assessing (or incentivizing) participation and effort:

• One of our responsibilities as instructors is to design courses in a way that motivates action. The degree to which you are responsible to do this depends on the context, what kind of learners you have, and what your ultimate hope is for them. 
• Many of the learning activities you set in front of students require whole-group participation for them to be effective. Hands-on tasks, lab practice, brainstorming...etc. require most, if not everyone to participate. Your class is more than just a bunch of individuals seeking individual goals. It is also a learning community, and learning communities require commitment and engagement from those individuals to the whole. Rewarding it with points can incentive that participation.
• Experiential learning requires experience first. Without participation in the experience, students have nothing on which to reflect. 
• Some outcomes actually target participation - contribute to..., act according to..., respond to..., volunteer to..., etc. 
• "Grading class participation signals to students the kind of learning and thinking an instructor values" (Bean & Peterson, 1998)

Arguments against assessing participation:

• In most cases, participation is a means to the end, not the end itself. Can a student succeed in your course without participating, e.g. can they read the syllabus, the textbook, submit assignments, show up for the exam and pass? 
• Everyone participates in different ways. You could argue that a student who shows up, sits silently in the back of your class, never checks their device or gets distracted, and fully engages their thinking is a strong participator. Another student who sits in the front, throws their hand up at every opportunity and talks non-stop, might appear "present", but not actually do any learning. Some students are shy and introverted, some are out-going. Marking participation can easily turn into rewarding certain personality types. 

If you've decided to assess or reward participation using grades as currency, here are some tips:

• Create a learning contract with students at the start of class, and circle back to it throughout the course. A TRIZ (www.liberatingstructures.com) works well here, too. Build the expectations as a learning community.  
• Have students self-evaluate against a set of criteria and provide evidence to support their score.
• Give clear rationale to why participation is necessary, what it looks like, and how it will be graded.
• Create tasks and assessments where participation is required in order to be successful, but not directly graded.
• Make sure the requirement to participate is explicitly referenced in at least one outcome.

STOP & THINK - What to you think about assessing participation in your course? Can you list three positive participatory behaviours that you would target in your course? 

6. Relational Skills

Many programs and courses emphasize the importance of relational skills positive personal work habits. That's because these skills are sought after in the work place. These skills also help students be successful in their studies. In some courses, these skills are explicitly taught, and sometimes they are merely hoped for. Some of the things included in this list would be:

• communication
• self-awareness
• self-regulation
• ability to read-the-room and sense the emotions of others
• care
• leadership
• professionalism
• active listening
• collaboration and teamwork
• conflict management
• cross-cultural competency
• openness to feedback

Relational skills are complex and contextual and often hard to measure. Workplaces across the world are constantly trying to determine whether job candidates have these skills from a short interview.  It's been said that many people-oriented jobs hire the person first and the practitioner second, so we want to set our students up to succeed in this arena. Relational skills are delicate to evaluate because they are closely tied to personality and emotional sensitivity. Here are some things to consider if you have relational skills as part of your course outcomes:

• Build trust with your learners. We are always happier to receive critique and feedback from someone we respect and trust.
• Get to know your students, their personalities, their backgrounds, and their goals.
• Be explicit about expectations in your course outline. If you expect professionalism while on practicum, then spell out exactly what this looks like. Remember, students have enrolled in formal study to learn these sorts of things, not just content. And not everyone, for example, knows how good leaders or self-aware learners behave.
• Encourage self- and peer- evaluation. The students are in this together and can therefore offer feedback to one another. Just be careful not to pit them against each other. 
• Ask before offering feedback. It's polite to say, for example, "Do you mind if I give you some feedback on your professionalism?" before you do.
• Focus on the behaviour, not the person. Don't say, "You lack care." Instead, identify the actions that might lead someone to believe they lack care. 
• Listen, observe, and inquire. Ask questions of what you saw.
• Use journaling, portfolios, role play, 360-degree feedback, interviewing, and observation as tools to assess relational skills. 

STOP & THINK: Every instructor hopes their students improve relational skills, but they are not always explicitly indicated in the outcomes. Do you have relational skills in your outcomes? How are they assessed?