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Assessing Student Learning

It is important to design your assessments so that they are clearly focused on determining whether your instructional goals, and your student learning objectives, are being met.
Though instructors generally assign students grades at the end of a particular unit, course etc., this type of assessment is called a summative assessment. However, summative assessment focuses on outcomes and not improvement. It does not provide frequent, informal opportunities to get detailed and specific information on what students are learning. Nor does it provide an opportunity for students to assess their own learning process.

The more informal and immediate feedback is called formative assessment, and is what provides information that allows changes to be made during a course, rather than at its conclusion. A useful analogy is that when chefs cook soup and taste it prior to serving to patrons, they are performing formative assessment.  Here they can still alter the soup before it is served.  When the chefs serve the soup to patrons they are performing a summative assessment.  Here the patrons taste the soup in its finished form.  There is no longer an opportunity to make changes to its preparation. 

Grades are summative and broad and usually assign a score to student performance across a set of learning objectives- such as for a unit of instruction or for the course itself-and thus provide little information on whether students attain the specific and distinct learning objectives you have defined.

Formative assessments may be graded or ungraded and allow the instructor to assess where the students are in terms of achieving learning goals prior to final assignment grades.  This allows the instructor to alter instruction to address deficiencies prior to conducting summative assessments.  Both types of assessment are vital to effective instruction. 

Aligning Assessment with Learning Objectives

By making sure that assessments are aligned with your student learning objectives, and the instructional content, it is easier to ensure that:

  • You get a chance to measure student learning of the desired objectives.
  • You are providing students with the opportunities to learn and practice the knowledge and skills that will be required on the various assessments, and
  • Teaching and assessing are occurring at the same outcome level (as defined by Bloom’s Taxonomy or any other taxonomy used).

Best Practice

  • All learning objectives should be assessed.
  • Critical learning objectives should employ both formative and summative assessments.
  • Using Bloom’s Taxonomy to think about what evidence is required to assess mastery of each objective can be helpful.

Determining Appropriate Assessment Tools

Student learning assessment can be done to determine student learning over a period of time (with assessment conducted at specific points over the semester) or it can be done at a chosen moment during the course, depending on what you hope to learn from the assessment. If the intent is to assess for example, what students know about a topic at the start of a semester, as compared to when they leave class, then the long term assessment is more appropriate. If, on the other hand, feedback is needed after a particular lecture, teaching a particular complicated issue,an immediate assessment is more appropriate and might take the form of a simple quiz, a sketch or a minute paper. While Classroom Assessment Techniques (known at CATs) are often used for formative assessment, these quick and timely assessment strategies can also be used as graded, more immediate assessments.