Implementing Your Course Assessment Plan

How do I know what students are learning and where they need help?  During a semester, you will want to evaluate assignments so that you and your students understand what they’ve learned and what they haven’t yet mastered.  You will do this through the graded assignments and also through using classroom time to monitor student learning.   

Assessment assumes that course grades alone are a proxy for learning and, thus, an indirect measure of student learning.  “Direct evidence of student learning is tangible, visible, self-explanatory, and compelling evidence of exactly what students have and have not learned.” (Suskie, 2009, 20)  Such evidence requires tools that disaggregate the averages of grades and specify which elements of the course students did and not did not master.  Examples of direct and indirect assessment measures are in the sidebar. 

Graded assignments are essential direct measures, so long as they are designed and graded with rubrics or blueprints, tools that faculty can use to break out the components of complex assignments and specify the different elements and qualities of work expected.  Rubrics outline scoring guides or list grading criteria so that you and your students can see how to prepare for projects, what is being evaluated, and in what ways they have achieved mastery or not.  If you have not used or seen rubrics in the past or thought about developing rubrics for your course assignments, there are many examples on the web.  See more about “Rubrics” and “Examples” in the sidebars. 

Test blueprints, like rubrics, provide a rationale for the elements of a complex task, in this instance by linking learning outcomes to the specific questions on a multiple-choice  test.  For any order of thinking above the memorization of factual information, test blueprints help guide faculty as they formulate multiple choice tests.  See more about “Blueprints” in the sidebar.

Classroom assessment, by contrast with course assessment, includes the myriad methods that faculty use to determine how their students are responding to materials and to presentation of materials and to make adjustments to remedy any emerging problems. Sometimes it is useful at different points in a semester to change directions or alter a format of delivery, integrate into the course more variety of approach.  A useful classroom assessment website for faculty in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math fields is http://www.flaguide.org/intro/contents.php. 

Some of the best known methods to assess the effectiveness of classroom learning are:

Method (Angelo & Cross ,1993)	Description
One-Minute Paper	At the end of a class session, a week, or a unit, ask students to take one minute to write responses to these two questions: 1.What is the idea you learned this week that you feel most confident about?  Explain in three sentences minimum. 2. What are the ideas you feel least confident about?  Can you explain what you don’t understand in three sentences maximum?
Muddiest Point (a variation of the Minute Paper)	At the end of a lecture or class discussion ask students either verbally or with brief written notes to respond to the questions: what did they glean from the lecture and what was unclear?
Concept Mapping	For course with conceptual learning, select a concept that is important to understanding the course and rich in connections, and prepare a model of mapping.  1.Brainstorm terms and short phrases; 2. Draw a Concept Map with the stimulus in the center and lines to other concepts; 3.After naming the primary associations, add secondary and even tertiary; 4.Write relationships on lines connecting the concepts; 5. Present the example to students and work it through with them.  Once the professor has presented a model of how to do it, design a concept mapping assignment for the class based on these steps, which might be an individual or group project.
Class Polling	Ask students to raise their hands or to complete a short, anonymous survey in response to a statement as a gauge of what students can identify or about which ideas, concepts or information they have a misconception.
Background knowledge probes	Assign or use in class some short tests/papers that help you: Understand the difference between student preparation and your expectation of preparation; Plan and prepare for upcoming course topics; and Identify to students areas in which they need to improve and resources with which to do so.

Angelo, T.A., Cross, K.P. (1993).  Classroom Assessment Techniques. A handbook for college teachers.  2nd edition. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Suskie, L. (2009).  Assessing Student Learning. A common sense guide, 2nd edition.  San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.