Standard 3: Assessment

Standard 3.1

Grading scale and policies are clear and consistent throughout the syllabus and course.

Standard 3.2

Multiple types of assessments provide multiple opportunities to measure achievement of course learning outcomes.

Standard 3.3

Descriptive evaluation criteria for each assessment provides guidance to the learner.

Assessment

Assessment is an integral component of the learning process, crafted to measure students' progress towards meeting a course's learning outcomes. While offering instructors a comprehensive view of student performance, assessment also provides learners with opportunities to monitor their own advancement throughout a course.

Just as you can't confirm a hypothesis without testing it, so, too, you can't confirm whether your students have achieved the course learning outcomes without some form of assessment. If you know where you want students to go (learning outcomes), you next need to decide how you'll know if they've gotten there (assessment). Assessment is that evidence.

Although the types of assessments that often first come to mind are a test, paper, or lab exercise, many other activities can be used for assessment, including portfolios, discussion forums, concept maps, case studies, diagrams, and presentations. Any tangible output from a learning activity can be assessed. Using multiple types of assessment like traditional, authentic, and alternative helps you meet Standard 3.2. Your choice of output—and the activity designed to generate that output—should be determined by your learning outcomes; this is just as true in the online environment as it is in the traditional classroom.

Please review the information below to learn how we will ensure your course meets this standard.

Grading scale and policies

To meet Standard 3.1, we will include a clearly written grading policy that is available to students at the beginning of the course in the syllabus to explain to students how course grades are calculated. It is important to ensure the grading policy is consistent and transparent throughout the entire course to include grading of assignments, quizzes, projects, and other forms of assessment. The late submission grading policy must also be clearly explained. For information on University Grading Policies, please review the UW Grading System and UW Institutional Assessment Plan for Student Learning. Courses should include a grade scheme. DesignPLUS offers an easy way to insert a simple grading scheme. If you select plus sign tab on the Side bar and scroll down > Course Information > Grading Scheme you will get what you see to the right.

The following grading standards will be used in this class:

Grade	Range
A	90% to <100%
B	80% to <90%
C	70% to <80%
D	60% to <70%
F	0% to <60%

A detailed grading policy might look something like this:

This grading policy provides students with clear information regarding what each assignment is worth in points, what percentage each assignment is of their total grade, which outcome(s) the assignment meets, and what a letter equivalent grade is for percentages.

Formative Assessment

formative Feedback Inage Formative assessment is designed to provide feedback to both student and instructors about how well the learning process is going. It typically involves low-stakes activities that help identify strengths, weaknesses, and areas needing improvement, and provides students a chance to demonstrate their knowledge, skills, and abilities and self-assess their learning and progress, allowing for immediate adjustments in instruction and study methods.

Another option for formative assessment is to develop a larger, summative assessment and break it into smaller components that can be turned in throughout the semester. This allows you to catch and address misconceptions, challenge students early analyses, and provide the opportunity for them to revise and resubmit each piece in a unified whole at the end of the semester.

Formative assessment options such as low-stakes, multi-attempt tests using the Canvas Quizzes tool, think-pair-share activities in discussion forums or group spaces, rough drafts, smaller, lower-stakes versions of later summative assessments, offer ways for students to assess their own understanding of course concepts. If you are interested in embedding some understanding checks in your Canvas pages, we can do this using Knowledge Check in Design Plus.

An often overlooked option for formative assessment is peer review and feedback. When adequately scaffolded, peer review and critique can be a learning activity for both the student giving and the student receiving the peer review. The Assignments tool in Canvas provides options for blind peer review, or you can set up a Discussion where students post their thoughts or explanations or examples and then provide feedback to their fellow classmates. Students can be split into small groups where they share an initial draft of a paper or project, give feedback to each other, and then work together to synthesize their best efforts into a group report. Using the Group spaces in Canvas allows the instructor to see all of the initial drafts and student discussions while keeping each group separated from the other groups.

In sum, these are the characteristics of formative assessment:

Occurs frequently throughout instruction (e.g., during a unit of study)
Informs ongoing instruction to improve student learning outcomes in real time
Usually covers smaller chunks of content (e.g., one skill or concept)
Changes the learning trajectory for students
Lower stakes, but highly important for adjusting instruction

Summative Assessment

Summative assessment is designed to provide evidence that students have achieved a learning objective or otherwise gained skills or knowledge throughout the course. Case studies, exams, projects, portfolios, and presentations are often used to summatively assess students' knowledge and skills. Courses that use a blend of summative and formative assessments provide more consistent support for learning than relying exclusively on a midterm and a final exam.

Final papers, projects, and portfolios have a variety of options in an online class. It's easy to incorporate media into Assessments, Discussions, and Pages - both in project instructions such as presenting a video case for analysis, and in student work such as recorded presentations, interviews, and demonstrations. A videoconferencing tool like Zoom web conferencing or MicroSoft Teams can be used for synchronous assessments such as oral exams in languages. Other tools like Yuja can be used to record individual video presentations or interactions such as mock counseling sessions and other role play scenarios which students can submit to an assignment or share in a discussion.

Examples of summative assessments:

Examinations (high-stakes)
Term/research papers (final versions)
Comprehensive projects
Portfolios (final submission)
Performances or recitals
Midterm exams
Final projects

Traditional Assessment

traditional Assess Ven Diagram Traditional assessment refers to standardized methods of evaluating student knowledge, typically through structured tests that emphasize recall and memorization. While they can provide quantifiable data on student performance, traditional assessments primarily focus on measuring factual knowledge rather than deeper understanding or application of concepts. They are the conventional methods of testing which usually produce a written document, such as a quiz, exam, or paper. Standardized tests, most state achievement tests, and high school graduation examinations are also examples of traditional assessment. Traditional assessment (defined mainly as discrete-item testing) tends to emphasize the development of a body of knowledge or skill. Does a student know the who, what, when, and where? Traditional assessment strategies are helpful when you want students to identify one best answer and/or target isolated skills in a concrete fashion.

Online testing using the Canvas Quizzes tool provides auto-grading and auto-feedback features with a wider range of options than paper or 'bubble sheet' testing. You can provide video, audio, and images as part of a question, and students can record or upload video, audio, and images as part of their answers. You can pre-set different feedback for different incorrect answers and even re-route students to a review page explaining the question in more depth.

If you do use online testing features, here are some options to consider:

Create multiple question banks for a single test - break down the questions that are delivered to students, so no one gets the exact same examination, but all are tested on similar concepts and at similar levels of difficulty.
Randomize the order of questions to discourage cheating
Randomize the answers and distractors to discourage cheating
Use an honor statement at the beginning of each test, forcing the students to check "yes" or "no" that they understand the academic dishonesty policy, and they have not received assistance.
For more options specific to the Canvas Quizzes tool, please see the Canvas Quizzes Instructor Guide.

Authentic Assessment

authentic Assess Ven Diagram Authentic assessment asks students to demonstrate skills and knowledge by performing realistic tasks within the discipline. It provides opportunities to practice, consult resources, get feedback, and refine performances and products. Well-designed authentic assessments:

are realistic, using real-life situations with constraints, purposes, and audiences that impact what needs to be done.
require judgment and innovation to effectively solve unstructured problems
assess students' ability to use their knowledge and skills to negotiate a complex task as a whole.

Authentic assessment commonly uses strategies such as case studies, simulations, consulting (where students work with real organizations to explore a problem and recommend solutions that are evaluated by both the instructor and the organizational partner), internships, and service learning. However, depending on the discipline, authentic assessment can leverage simpler tools. For example,

situating statistical questions in the context of fantasy sports over several weeks of a season,
sending emails in a foreign language to request information about a travel destination and working with a small group to determine which destination would be the best vacation spot.

Grant Wiggins seminally defined authentic assessment as “engaging and worthy problems or questions of importance, in which students must use knowledge to fashion performances effectively and creatively. The tasks are either replicas of or analogous to the kinds of problems faced by adult citizens and consumers or professionals in the field.”

In short, whether online or face-to-face, authentic assessment -- such as case studies, scenario-based projects and word problems -- most often represents a superior way of measuring students’ learning, engaging and empowering them to demonstrate knowledge rather than demanding that they prove their worth via high-stakes exams. (Harrison, 2020)

Alternative Assessment

Ungrading is an alternative assessment approach that minimizes or eliminates traditional grading systems, focusing instead on providing detailed feedback to foster student growth and learning in relation to course objectives. This practice shifts the emphasis from summative scores to formative assessment, encouraging students to reflect on their progress and engage more deeply with the course material, while often still accommodating the need for final grades through methods such as self-assessment or completion-based evaluation.

Rubrics

Rubrics serve as essential tools for outlining expectations and assessment criteria in the learning process. By implementing rubrics, instructors can effectively communicate how students are expected to demonstrate their knowledge and how their performance will be evaluated exemplifying Standard 3.3. These structured evaluation guides offer students a roadmap of how their work will be assessed. By making assessment criteria explicit, rubrics help decrease ambiguities, and they can allow students to self-assess their own work prior to submitting, providing immediate formative feedback.

Rubric Resources:

Developing Rubrics (HLC: Susan Hatfield - Senior Scholar)
Creating and Using Rubrics (Carnegie Mellon University)