Assessing the different kinds of learning

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?