Assessment Toolkit
Apply the USask Assessment Principles to your assessments with these practical design questions
Good assessment helps students show what they have learned while also supporting their learning along the way. This toolkit turns the six course-based USask Assessment Principles into practical questions to help you design or improve an assessment.
Six questions to guide your assessment design:
Explore approaches that promote meaningful learning, student success, and continuous improvement in your courses.
How do I...
- Ensure I am assessing what students need to learn?
- Make assessments clear and fair for students?
- Give students opportunities to practice, get feedback, and improve?
- Support students to take ownership of their learning?
- Help students apply their learning in meaningful ways?
- Design assessments that support student well-being?
Question 1 begins below on this page. Follow the links at the bottom to navigate through the toolkit. Each question in the Toolkit offers guidance, implementation ideas, resources to explore, and quick actions that can be applied across a wide range of teaching contexts.
Q1 - How do I ensure I am assessing what students need to learn?
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.
Resources to Support
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.
Quick win: Choose one existing assignment and identify which learning outcome(s) it measures. If you cannot clearly answer that question, revise the assignment or the outcome.
USask Resources
- Writing Learning Outcomes - Course Design Handbook
- Aligning Assessment with Outcomes - Course Design Handbook
- Course Alignment Template
- Checking the thinking level of learning of your exam questions - Article
- Designing multiple-choice questions - Article
Course Alignment Ideas
Educators can strengthen course alignment by:
- Writing 3-6 clear learning outcomes before designing assignments or exams.
- Using the learning outcomes as a checklist when creating assessment questions.
- Mapping each major assessment to specific course outcomes.
- Removing assignment components that do not directly measure intended learning.
- Sharing learning outcomes with students and referring to them throughout the term.
- Reviewing exams and assignments to ensure students are assessed on material they had opportunities to learn and practice.
- Creating simple grading rubrics that explicitly connect criteria to learning outcomes.
- Asking: "What evidence would convince me a student has achieved this outcome?" before designing an assessment.
Common Concerns & Related Literature:
While 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 contextualized and realized and give growth opportunities for exceptional 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.
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.
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.
|
Big ideas |
Literature |
|---|---|
|
Constructive alignment |
Foundational: Biggs, J. (1996) |
|
Assessing our learning outcomes |
Landscape review Canada: MacFarlane (2016) Landscape review US: Kuh (2014) |
Next in the Toolkit:
Question 2: How do I make my assessments clear and fair for students?
The Assessment Toolkit: 6 Questions to guide your assessment design.
- How do I ensure I am assessing what students need to learn? (current page)
- How do I make assessments clear and fair for students?
- How do I give students opportunities to practice, get feedback, and improve?
- How do I support students take ownership of their learning?
- How do I help students apply their learning in meaningful ways?
- How do I design assessments that support student well-being?
Get Support
- Attend GMCTL workshops to learn about the Assessment Principles and how to use within your course.
- Book a one-to-one consultation with GMCTL experts who can help you design a full assessment consistent with the principles for your course.