toolbox
Designing assessment
The first step of the assessment cycle is deciding about your assessment design. You start by formulating your learning objectives, think about the purposes of assessment, choose a suitable method (or more than one) and bring it all together in your assessment scheme. Then you construct the assessment specification table, as the blueprint for a specific assessment method you will use. With these sound preparatory actions, you will be well on your way.
- Prerequisite: Formulating learning objectives
The essence of learning outcomes and how to formulate them
Why are learning objectives so essential?
Clear and well-formulated learning outcomes guide all decisions you need to make regarding the teaching and learning activities and assessment in your course (see also: Constructive alignment).
NB. We use most of the time the term learning objectives but the term intended learning objectives or outcomes (ILO's) is also often heard or learning goals.
Advantages of formulating learning objectives:- it provides focus. It shows what is important, and what is the general level of learning.
- it is a way of sharing your ideas about the learning objectives within your programme. Peers, educational designers, and colleagues can give advice and feedback. You and others can see and discuss how a course fits into the curriculum plan and relates to other courses.
- it gives guidance on the design of your assessment.
- it gives guidance on the design of your teaching activities.
- it gives guidance on the materials you need for your students.
- it it gives direction to the students' learning process.
How to write clear learning objectives?
It is important that you formulate clear learning objectives. But how can you realize this? Very briefly explained, the essence of formulating learning objectives is that...A good notion about how to write clear learning objectives provides the following video:
To summarize:
- You start with: At the end of the course the student is able to... Or make it a bit more personal: ... you will be able to....
- Outcomes should be observable and measurable. They demonstrate that students have learned knowledge,,achieved skills and competencies at a specific proficiency level.
- Use active verbs. Verbs like: write, draw, tell, analyze, calculate etc. Avoid verbs that are rather vague and ambiguous, like: think, understand.
- Be as specific and clear as possible.
Action verbs
Benjamin Bloom (1956) designed a taxonomy for learning objectives in the cognitive (knowledge-based), affective (emotion-based) and psychomotor (action-based) domain.
The cognitive domain taxonomy is mostly used in the education context. The Bloom structure helps to structure and align the learning objectives, assessments and teaching activities. The most import thing is that this model may help you to think about what you really want the students to be able to at the end of your course and to specify this as specific and clear as possible. See it as an aid.
On the right we show you the taxonomy in a picture. Actually, this is the revised version by Anderson & Krathwohl (2001). A lot of information and nice models can be found on Internet when you search for Bloom's taxonomy. See also some suggestions further below.For those who like to get more ideas:
Would you like to have some support in formulating the ilo's? This Learning Objective Maker (easygenerator.com) might help.
Hand-out Writing learning outcomes: A very helpful, practical article about formulating learning objectives. In this hand-out you can also find information about Benjamin Blooms' taxonomy. Bloom identified several levels, each with a list of suitable verbs, for describing levels in objectives. The levels are arranged from the least complex levels of thinking to the most complex levels of thinking. NB. We are not sure about the copyright. If you know more about it, we would like to give credits.
Alternatives for Bloom?
Bloom is very common, but there are other taxonomies. One of the more well-known ones is the Structure of the Observed Learning Outcome (SOLO) taxonomy, a framework devised by John Biggs and Kevin Collis (1982). For more infromation, see for instance: Align with taxonomies - Learning and Teaching: Teach HQ (monash.edu).Some more interesting links, videos and documents:
- Video about Bloom's TaxonomyLinks to an external site.
- Bloom's taxonomy of learning domainsLinks to an external site.: Nice examples of the link between the levels and teaching activities.
- Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy – Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (iastate.edu)
- A very useful site about learning objectives (and much more), is the site from Eberly Center from the Carnegie Mellon Universisty.
- Decide on the purpose of your assessment
What is your our purpose when we test?
Two main distinction regarding the purpose for assessing students are often made: assessment for formative purposes and assessment for summative purposes. In the image below the differences are indicated.
It is important to realize that the distinction is about the purpose of assessment and not about the method used. A MC test can be used for a summative purpose; based on the score a student gets a grade for the course. A MC test can also be used during a course for a formative purpose; as a way to let the students check how much of the course they've already mastered and for the teacher to see whether extra attention is needed for some problem areas.
A main characteristic for formative assessment is that it involves feedback, whether the feedback is based on self-assessment, peer-assessment, or feedback from the teacher or teacher-assistants. It might be feedback provided on paper or in Canvas (model answers to check homework questions for instance) or plenary during a lecture. The main goal is to support the students in their learning process. Intermediate feedback provided to students when they work on a larger assignment (e.g. a project assignment), can also be seen as a kind of formative assessment.
- Assessment scheme
How to create an assessment sceme for your course
An assessments scheme (aka test plan, assessment plan) helps to show the validity of your assessment for a course (unit, module).It provides an overview of all assessments in relation to the learning objectives and with weights and conditions.
At the UT it is expected that the above mentioned information is presented to the students before the start of a course. As a teacher you are expected to be able to design an assessment scheme for your own course or unit.
You can use different kind of formats. Below is an example of a format for a course (or education unit within a module) and further below an example of how an assessment scheme for a module might look like.
- Assessment specification table
An assessment specification table as blueprint for your assessment
What is an assessment specification table for?
Let us say you are constructing a written test. In a test you cannot ask for everything the students have had to learn. The test will always use a sample of questions to determine what the students have learned. But how can you be sure that the sample is representative of the subject matter? That the learning objectives are well covered? That the questions asked are on the right level (of Bloom)? That your resit test will be similar to your first test? That if you use a database of questions, each test is similar?
An assessment specification table (aka a test specification table or matrix) can help you with this. It can be seen as the blueprint. It helps the examiner to construct a test that focuses on the key areas and weights different areas based on their importance. A test specifications table provides evidence that a test has content & construct validity. Construct validity means: Does the test measure the concept that it’s intended to measure? Content validity means: Is the test fully representative of what it aims to measure? (To read more about relevant criteria, see [The four types of validity.].)
>> A useful format can be downloaded [here].