Assessing the different kinds of learning

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?