Course Assessment

Assessment Fundamentals

Integrating various methods of assessment into the course design is essential to help students meet learning outcomes. Assessments should:

  • Be aligned with student learning outcomes.
  • Be integrated into the course design.
  • Include both formative and summative elements.

  • Evaluate higher-order as well as lower-order skills.

Formative & Summative Assessment

Assessments are used at the end of a learning unit to measure the knowledge students have gained. Traditionally, assessment mechanisms have taken the form of high-stakes objective-based tests and quizzes (multiple-choice, true-false, fill-in, short answer). Truly understanding how much a student is learning in the distance education environment, however, means incorporating authentic assessments aimed at evaluating not just students鈥� knowledge, but also how well they are able to apply that knowledge to real-world tasks that require higher-order cognitive skills.

When creating assessments for a course, it is helpful to think of the two major types of assessments, formative and summative.

Formative Assessment

Assessment that is carried out in order to form a picture of the learning process. Formative assessments are ongoing and can be used by both the student and instructor to gather information about how well the course is meeting the needs of the students. With formative assessments student participation plays an active role, as feedback is used to develop and set goals to further student learning outcomes. Discussion posts, journals and portfolio reflections are examples of this type of assessment.

Summative Assessment

Assessment that is used to measure what students have learned/mastered. Summative assessments involve assigning a grade and are generally the most common form of assessment in the traditional classroom environment. End of the unit tests and term papers are examples of this type of assessment. 

Integrating Assessment Types

It might seem that formative and summative assessments are mutually exclusive. However, when assessment is a cohesive part of the course design, there is often a balance of both assessment types. When formative assessments are used in conjunction with summative assessments, they will provide a more complete portrait of student learning. This is also known as continuous assessment.For example, instructor feedback on term paper outlines and drafts and peer reviews can be used by a student for a final draft that receives a letter grade. In this process-oriented approach to assessment, both the instructor and student adjust their teaching and learning during the first part of the project, resulting in a final product that receives a grade. 

Authentic Assessment & Course Design

When incorporating formative and authentic assessments into course design, assessment shifts from the evaluation of knowledge through an isolated testing event to a measure of the performance (known as performance-based assessment) of how much students are learning. Assessment is no longer linked to a single grade on a midterm or final, but rather is seen as integral to course design, and determines what instructors need to do to adjust their teaching in order to meet student learning outcomes.

Unit Example

Many of the sample tasks listed in the table describing Bloom鈥檚 Taxonomy can be used as formative assessments for projects that are formally evaluated. Because assessment in the traditional classroom is often limited to one quiz or test that demonstrates recall (and/or perhaps just guessing) of information, instructors have less information available to them to assess student learning. When using authentic assessments, however, instructors have more documentation and are therefore able to gain deeper insight about a student鈥檚 actual comprehension of the content.

The same holds true for midterm and final project