6. Assessment & Feedback

Synopsis from Self-Review

The strategies you can use for students to demonstrate their learning vary along many dimensions (e.g., the purpose of the assessment; low-stakes quizzing or high-stakes exams; the level of sequencing and scaffolding of assignments, in which a larger assignment is broken up into component pieces). Review strategies for enhancing the variety and frequency of assessments in order to give you and your students targeted and reliable insight into how they are learning.

How to Put Into Practice

The benefits of giving students frequent and varied opportunities to demonstrate their learning are manyfold. This approach supports student engagement because students are rewarded by studying and keeping up with course activities on a regular basis. Knowledge-checks designed to give students insight into their level of understanding can help them alter their study habits and help you target your instruction ahead of higher-stakes assessments. Assignments that incorporate student choice, student interests, and connections to the real world deepen their engagement with the material and skills they are learning. All these practices discourage cheating and enhance students’ capacity and motivation to bring intentional, rigorous attention to their own work.

Varieties of Assessment 

Review some varieties of assessment to help you select the strategies best suited to a course. The two concepts to focus on overall are to (1) vary the purpose of the assessment (what you want to get out of having students demonstrate their learning); and (2) vary the form of the assessment (what students actually do), all in alignment with the learning outcomes of the course.

A common framework for describing assessment is to break down assessments into three different purposes: diagnostic, formative, and summative.

Diagnostic assessments provide a quick look into what students know or understand at the start of a period of time (the start of a course, unit, or class session). These are usually brief, informal, and ungraded. Examples include:

Formative assessments monitor student learning on an ongoing basis with the goal of providing actionable feedback to students and informing instruction. This helps you and your students resolve areas of confusion before they approach summative or higher-stakes assessments. These can be graded or not, and usually entail a significant feedback component. Examples include:

Summative assessments are designed for students to demonstrate what they have learned at the end of a period of time (the end of a unit or the end of the course). These assessments  measure students’ cumulative understanding and skills in relation to the course learning outcomes. Summative assessments also provide students with an opportunity to demonstrate higher-order and comprehensive learning. Summative assessments are almost always graded, and feedback often focuses on what to do differently in the future. Examples include:

Variety in how assignments are graded. Using a mix of graded and ungraded assessments and varying the stakes of graded assignments helps you underscore the purpose of the assignment. For instance, a knowledge check quiz intended to surface common misunderstandings about a concept is best implemented as either an ungraded or a low-stakes complete/incomplete grade. This is consistent with its purpose as a tool to help students revisit the concept (for instance, ahead of a higher-stakes assessment of their learning).

Classroom assessment techniques. Classroom assessment techniques (CATS for short) are menus of in-class formative assessments that tell you what students are learning and how you might adjust your instruction. There are many online collections of classroom assessment techniques to choose from, such as by Vanderbilt University and University of Michigan. 

• While CATS originated with face-to-face instruction, many techniques convert well to synchronous or asynchronous activities. This resource offers detailed guidance on how to implement selected classroom assessment techniques and other learning activities in online and in-person formats. The page is organized around four types of learning activities— critical thinking, discussions, prior knowledge, and problem solving—and supplies details for each technique like prep time (from low to high prep) and level of complexity.
• Feedback on CATS is very often informal and delivered to the group as a whole. One might quickly skim (for example) a set of responses to a Muddiest Point question and then take a few minutes in a class session or feedback video to share with the class what you noticed and address confusions.

Real-world connections. Consider assessments that connect to the real world in the sense that they have students do things or create things that exist outside of the classroom, respond to real-life situations, or draw on professional practice in a field or discipline. 

• This resource on authentic assessment from Indiana University offers a brief but substantive introduction to this approach with examples from various disciplines.
• Using a case studies activity is one accessible and engaging strategy.

Student choice and creation. Introduce elements of student choice into how they demonstrate their learning. 

• For example, a final project might ask students to express their learning in one of several forms (e.g., paper, video, audio podcast, or a website). 
• To introduce choice on a smaller scale, students might select their own paper topics with your approval, or participate in generating high-quality questions and responses that will feed into the question bank for a quiz.
• Use a student-generated rubric. Share some completed assignment examples with students and ask them to derive rubric criteria from those examples.

Scaffolding and sequencing. Breaking up a longer assignment into its component skills and parts is an almost automatic way to introduce variety and frequency. 

• UW-Madison’s Writing Across the Curriculum program offers a guide sequencing writing assignments in different ways and a library of sample assignments from UW-Madison instructors: Sequencing and Scaffolding Assignments in your Course (opens in Pressbooks).

Individual and collaborative. Mixing individual and collaborative work creates variety while enhancing peer connections. To use group assignments effectively, see Recommendation 4.4 Group Work.

Reflection and metacognition. Metacognition, or thinking about one’s own thinking, is a habit that increases students’ ability to deeply process and apply what they are learning to new contexts. Asking brief reflection questions are a way to support this type of thinking while reaping the benefits of formative assessment (asking students to demonstrate their learning-in-progress). For instance, after a group discussion or forum interaction, you might ask, “What is one thing that you learned from a classmate?” or “How did your understanding of this topic shift after watching this video?”

Additional Resources

• Create self-check Canvas Quizzes for formative assessments that provide automatic feedback explaining why answers are correct or incorrect. To do this, click the three dots below each possible response to enter explanatory text.
• Consider alternative summative assessments. Alternatives to exams like final projects, portfolios, or group assignments can provide a way for students to authentically demonstrate their command of course concepts. Carefully constructed alternative assessments can help measure existing learning goals and work as a replacement for or complement to exams. Consider alternative testing strategies (shared by the Division of Continuing Studies, Learning Design Development and Innovation team).