Assessment: A Refresher and Overview

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.