Summary: Courses should have clear intentions about what students will learn, and the instruction should be focused on students learning the intended outcomes. Assessment of learning should accurately and consistently measure the degree to which intended learning has occurred in the course, so that grades are accurate and consistent.

Implementing into your course: Alignment refers to the process of planning your learning outcomes to describe what your students will be able to do, know or value, and then planning how you will assess and teach based on those outcomes. When aligning to outcomes, you only gather evidence of academic achievement that is critical to those outcomes.

USask Resources:

• Writing outcomes and constructive alignment - Course Design Handbook
• Aligning assessment with outcomes - Course Design Handbook
• Checking the thinking level of learning of your exam questions
• Designing multiple-choice questions

Common Concerns:

Learning beyond intended outcomes: While is a course is designed to teach specific outcomes, some learners may learn more than the course is specifically designed to teach. While it is unfair to assess everyone on things people might learn independently, you can offer choice in assessment. Alternatives should require equivalent effort and focus on the same main outcomes, but they can offer alternatives for how those outcomes are contextualised and realized and give growth opportunities for exceptional students.

Accommodation by altering learning outcomes for some students: Accommodation should focus on providing different circumstances under which students still demonstrate the outcomes, for example, meeting the outcome with more time or with the aid of a technology.

Grade Inflation: The gradual shift to higher grades over time is a documented phenomenon in K-12 and higher education and it is not caused by aligning course learning outcomes and assessments. If an educator or program are using a competency-based program, it is likely that grades will be more uniformly high, as students are not allowed to progress if they have not hit the threshold for a high level of understanding. In conventional grading structures, where inflation is a concern, prevention of grad inflation comes from using a commonly agreed on standard (like the literal descriptors of grades) and regularly reviewing assessments with disciplinary colleagues to ensure the assessment is designed with the right level of difficulty for the level and outcomes of the course.

Co-constructed outcomes: Sometimes outcomes are co-constructed with students, which is a progressive and student-centered practice. It is not incompatible with the principle of aligning course outcomes and instruction. The course still revolves around those outcomes, and assessment it based on it, it is just also negotiated with students. Related practices include co-constructed assessment criteria and choice in assessment types.

Summary: For assignments to be equitable and valid representations of what all students know and can do, it should be clear in advance what is expected and what the criteria are for doing well. When all the assessments in a course are designed to advantage a specific small set of learning traits over others, they can be unintentionally unfair. An example might be creating all assessments with tight timelines, which advantage all learners who process quickly over those who think deeply over time.

Implementing into your course: When assessment is inclusive and transparent, students understand what they are trying to demonstrate through an assessment and what specific characteristics a good assessment product has. When we make assessments more inclusive, they are designed to work well for a variety of access needs and cultures, often through choice or universal design.

USask Resources:

• Universal Design overview and One Small Step “how to” book
• Reliable, valid and fair assessment
• Overview of Transparent assessment
• Understanding oral exams and Open book exams
• How to build a rubric

Common Concerns:

Accommodation: Decision made to make assessments more secure can often also make them less fair and ensure they will require more accommodations. Common examples of this include time limits, not allowing students to go back to previous questions on digital assessment, and requiring students to write previously take-home assessments in class. It is important that educators think carefully about how these assessment conditions might impact students with different learning needs.

Spoon-feeding: Clear criteria for what is “good” may seem like giving so much information that students do not have to put in effort and might not develop self-directed learning and critical thinking skills. Instead, it tells students what you want them to focus on and ensures all students have the same information and are able deduce what is most important to learn regardless of if they are first in family at university, or new to Canada, or have more experience and connections.

Summary: Students learn more and do better on summative assessment when they have practice and get feedback during the learning process, blending learning and assessment together. Known as formative assessment or Assessment for Learning, these types of assessment fulfill the purpose of improving learning, not just measuring it, and using practice and feedback so students improve disciplinary skills and understanding more quickly and effectively. Formative assessment allows faculty to directly observe learning happening, rather than simply teaching something and then hoping (but not necessarily knowing) that students learn it for the high stakes end of term exam.

• Practice is effective if it is focused on the most critical elements students will need to apply in later classes or work, and student errors are caught early.  It might include sample questions, Poll Everywhere check ins, class activities, skills labs, or smaller parts of larger assessments handed through staged or laddered assessments.
• Feedback is effective if it is timely, designed to help learners know what to do, and clear.  It can take many forms, for example feedback to the whole class about common errors, self-assessment against criteria, comparison to examples, peer feedback and auto-graded quizzes.  

Implementing into your course: When assessment is designed to improve students learning, students get early, often ungraded, feedback on their practice. They learn how to do well, and then do an assessment designed to demonstrate their completed learning. Timely feedback and reflection are designed into the course.

USask Resources:

• Preparing students to give and receive feedback
• Use technology (e.g., Canvas Quizzes and Poll Everywhere) to scale practice and feedback
• Learn about how to give efficient feedback
• Read how to make room in your course for practice
• Explore how to use H5P activities to embed practice within Canvas pages

Common Concerns:

Course Density: Because courses have a lot to cover, it can be hard to find the time in the course for practice and feedback. However, focusing on the most essential and embedding practice and feedback makes it much more likely students will remember what was taught long enough to use it in other courses or after graduation. Covering course content rapidly is most associated with rapid post-course forgetting. Read more about this in research on cognitive overload, surface learning and cramming.  

Faculty Time: Providing feedback does take time and is more of a challenge in large classes, however, even using audience response systems like Poll Everywhere in class of 200 can significant increase how much student understand and remember, which makes it worth spending scarce resources on. Feedback can come from peers, self, automated grading systems, and be for the whole class. Extended written feedback is the most time consuming for faculty, and students are less likely to engage deeply with it because it often occurs when the opportunity to use it to improve a grade is over. Focus on easier, more immediate feedback like Poll Everywhere or think/pair share to save time.

Students not completing ungraded tasks: Students wisely put their limited time and effort into things that will help their grades, but getting a grade also inadvertently signals the learning is done. Clearly communicate how the practice will improve their grades, and many students will choose to make the effort, especially if it is obviously true based on the results of the first graded assessment. If your goal is for students to keep learning, giving low weight grades for regular learning activities in class can make a difference to students, as can an opportunity to re-do high stakes tasks.

Summary: Educators are concerned students are putting in less effort, or that they may be missing core skills needed to achieve at university. Effective assessment practices can directly combat this concern. Having students self-assess, give feedback to peers, reflect on and make choices about how they show what they have learned, and are all connected to better learning and more engagement.

Implementing into your course: The assessments that make the biggest long-term impact on student learning require them to engage with complex issues and problems, make choices about how to proceed and reflect on how they did. 

USask Resources:

• Learn about grading reflection
• Consider how offering choice in assessmentimpacts student ownership of learning

Common Concerns:

Assessment choice makes comparing students hard: In order for choice to really be equitable, all the choices need to be a relatively equally time consuming and be equally good at demonstrating the course outcomes. Giving choice to do 3 of 5 long answer questions of similar difficulty (and on the same learning outcomes) during an exam is a simple example of equitable choice.

It is hard to grade reflection: Have clear criteria for grading reflective assessments (like journals, self-assessments, or critiques) that focus on how well learners explain what they learned, give personal examples that are relevant, and articulate barriers.

Summary: Authentic assessment is assessment that reflects how the learning is demonstrated in the community or profession, and can have up to three elements of authenticity:

• Authentic conditions: The students have the types of tools (resources, technology, etc.) they would have in the “real world” when they do the skill or demonstrate the understanding.
• Authentic context: The variables that will impact performance are present in the assessment, like complex evolving information, a live audience, or group that will be using what the students make. This might also be called an authentic situation.
• Authentic assessors: The people grading the assessment aren’t the course educators, they are people who do this task regularly.

Common authentic assessments include case base learning, labs and clinics, performance and showcases, community partnerships, open pedagogy, and experiential learning activities, such as placements, rotations, and internships.

Implementing into your course: Our disciplines play important roles in the fabric of our society. Well-designed assessments help students to think like members of our disciplines and professions and use the types of skills they will use when they graduate.

USask Resources:

• AI and authentic assessment
• Understanding authentic assessment

Common Concerns:

Authentic assessment requires time and money: While some formats (like labs or placements) do, changing exams questions to include complex variables, or using case studies, undergraduate research, critique, and problem-based learning are course-based and can be foundational to the discipline without requiring more time or money. Where it is more time consuming, like labs or placements, colleges often have additional supports to help.

Assessors grade differently: It is often true that assessors of the same thing grade it differently, sometimes even without knowing why, and articulating they know “good” when they see it. In experiential learning, this can most significant when preceptors (members of the profession) assess students from the university. Having a common process to agree what “good” looks like and conditions you might see it in is an essential annual process to ensure that assessment has good inter-rater reliability (producing the same result in the same circumstances). Often there is more openness to working on inter-rater reliability in applied professional settings than there is academia, both in both cases, time and autonomy remain concerns.

Summary: Educators are not responsible for managing student health and well-being, but we can design assessments that are more or less likely to cause stress and anxiety. We can avoid having only one or two high stakes exams as the sole assessments, we can space out deadlines and respond to genuine emergencies, and we can use assessment transparency to ensure students focus their efforts on what is critical for the course. Both scaffolding assessment (breaking them into smaller parts with feedback) so students are typically well-prepared and carefully sequencing the learning (to make sure students have the opportunities to develop pre-requisite skills and understanding) are important elements of good assessment design that supports student learning and well-being, and they are within the control of the educator.

Implementing into your course: A key goal of the assessment process is to help as many students as possible learn course outcomes. To that end, it is important to only assess skills and content you have spent substantial time teaching, and to assess chunks or steps of hard concepts to help students break hard learning into parts.

USask Resources:

• Learn planning process for sequencing learning and assessment on a specific outcome
• Learn about using scaffolding to design assessments, including sequencing, chunking, and the importance of students receiving feedback along the way
• Learn about making expectations clear to reduce uncertainty

Common Concerns:

Educators are not responsible for student wellness: Educators are only responsible for their assessment design and creating balance and transparency in it. While it is an important responsibility of an educator to design balanced and transparent assessments, it is not appropriate to design assessments around a specific student's wellness needs.

Accommodation requests continue to increase: Both physical and mental conditions can be legally required reasons for accommodations. As our understanding of how people learn and the physical environments that support learning continues to grow, so has the need for accommodation. In addition, poor mental health is a growing concern among youth. Implementation of the USask Assessment Principles (in particular 2, but also 1 and 3), may help to mitigate the need for accommodations.

About the change:

Berry, R., & Adamson, B. (Eds.). (2011). Assessment reform in education: policy and practice (Vol. 14). Springer Science & Business Media.

Boud, D., & Associates (2010). Assessment 2020: Seven propositions for assessment reform in higher education. Sydney: Australian Learning and Teaching Council. 

Hattie, J. (2009). The black box of tertiary assessment: An impending revolution. Tertiary assessment & higher education student outcomes: Policy, practice & research, 259, 275.

Designed as how to and why information for faculty:

Bloxham, S. and Boyd, P. (2007) Developing effective assessment in higher education: a practical guide, Maidenhead:  Open University Press.

Bryan, C., & Clegg, K. (Eds.). (2019). Innovative Assessment in Higher Education: A Handbook for Academic Practitioners (2nd ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429506857

Clark, D., & Talbert, R. (2023). Grading for growth: A guide to alternative grading practices that promote authentic learning and student engagement in higher education (1st ed.). Routledge.

McConlogue, T. (2020). Assessment and Feedback in Higher Education: A Guide for Teachers. UCL Press.