Assessment Toolkit
Q6: How do I design assessments that support student well-being?
Continuing with the six questions to guide your assessment design:
How do I make assessments clear and fair for students?
- How do I ensure I am assessing what students need to learn?
- 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?
Q6: How do I design assessments that support student well-being?
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.
Resources to Support
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.
Quick win: Create a simple assessment calendar and review it from a student's perspective to identify periods of unusually high workload.
USask Resources
- Sequencing an Outcome - Article
- Scaffolded learning with timely feedback - Article (York University)
- Give Efficient Feedback – Article
- Clear Expectations (to reduce uncertainty) - Overview
- EAL Students and Academic Integrity - Article
Course Alignment Ideas
Educators can support student well-being by:
- Mapping assessment deadlines across the term to avoid unnecessary clustering.
- Sharing important assessment dates as early as possible.
- Breaking large assessments into manageable stages.
- Providing clear expectations and instructions to reduce uncertainty.
- Offering opportunities for students to demonstrate learning before high-stakes assessments.
- Considering flexibility where it supports learning and fairness.
- Reviewing the overall workload required for assessments.
- Checking in with students periodically about their learning experience and assessment schedule.
Common Concerns & Related Literature:
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.
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.
|
Big ideas |
Literature |
|---|---|
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Academic Stress |
Literature review: Ribeiro (2018) |
|
Sequencing |
Foundational: Reigeluth, 1999 |
|
Designing for assessment integrity |
How to book: Langara College, nd. Encouraging Academic Integrity Through Intentional Assessment Design |
Overview
The Assessment Toolkit: 6 Questions to guide your assessment design.
- How do I ensure I am assessing what students need to learn?
- 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? (current page)
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.