Aligning with Assessment

Fig­ur­ing out how to assess stu­dents can be chal­leng­ing. There are var­i­ous con­sid­er­a­tions, includ­ing the tim­ing of assess­ment, the num­ber of stu­dents involved, exter­nal con­straints (e.g., guide­lines of provin­cial gov­ern­ing bod­ies), to name a few.

Anoth­er con­sid­er­a­tion is how to align learn­ing out­comes with assess­ment. Align­ment means ensur­ing there is a direct con­nec­tion between the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of assess­ment. For exam­ple, if we want to under­stand stu­dents’ under­stand­ing of a con­cept, we might decide that ask­ing stu­dents to apply the con­cept to a case study might pro­vide a more accu­rate assess­ment of stu­dent learn­ing than ask­ing them to respond to a mul­ti­ple-choice quiz. On the oth­er hand, to assess knowl­edge that needs to be mem­o­rized in order to pro­vide foun­da­tion­al knowl­edge for high­er lev­el think­ing / knowl­edge appli­ca­tion, a mul­ti­ple-choice test might be the best choice.

The advan­tages of align­ing assess­ment with learn­ing out­comes include:

• • greater accu­ra­cy in iden­ti­fy­ing what stu­dents have learnt and the areas in which they need fur­ther sup­port
  • increased engage­ment of stu­dents in the assess­ment process
  • oppor­tu­ni­ties to use meth­ods beyond timed exams that are hard to employ fair­ly in an online envi­ron­ment
  • poten­tial for few­er issues relat­ing to aca­d­e­m­ic integri­ty