Helping students progress towards their educational goals involves communicating how far they have come and how far they have yet to go. This is the role of assessment. Designing meaningful assessment activities (and using those activities to guide further learning) is a key aspect of successful teaching. And yet, all too often the grades/feedback that students receive in our classes appear disconnected from the learning process: terminal, often arbitrary, judgements rather than helpful signposts. Ideally, academic assessment should promote long-lasting learning by providing ongoing, actionable feedback on student progress. Traditional assessment structures focused on high-stakes exams (or single-draft final projects delivered after the last day of class) tend to promote a “cram-and-forget” approach to learning. In contrast, low-stakes assessments allow students to track their progress and direct their attention to gaps that most require additional practice. The benefits of spaced practice and regular information retrieval (the testing effect) are well-documented: frequent low-stakes assessments can strengthen long-term knowledge retention, help develop strong study habits, encourage integrating old and new material (interleaving), and prepare students for successfully tackling final exams and projects

Designing Assessments for Learning

Assessment of student learning falls into two broad categories: formative assessment (forward-looking, process-focused assessment designed to track progress and identify areas in need of improvement) and summative assessment (the evaluation of learning that has already occurred against a benchmark or set of standards). Formative assessment is most often associated with low-stakes activities like rough drafts, quizzes, and practice exercises. Summative assessment commonly involves examinations and final projects delivered at the end of a term or course of study. A well-conceived course assessment design might include a series of regular formative assessments leading up to an end-of-unit or end-of-term summative assessment (both clearly aligned with course learning goals). Under this model, the students and the instructor can monitor and adjust the learning process, using assessment as a dynamic learning tool rather than a static final statement.

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The Art of Feedback

Improving performance based on feedback is the heart of learning–and yet, in many academic courses, students only receive feedback on their work at the very end of the term (if at all), once the opportunity to use the feedback for improvement is long past. At this late stage, the feedback is often accompanied by a grade, and serves more as a justification for that grade than a communication to the learner about how they might continue progressing in their academic development. This distinction is important for student perceptions of the feedback as well: a frequently cited 1988 study demonstrated that student engagement and performance were lower for students receiving comments accompanied by a grade than for students who received comments only. When tied to a grade, feedback feels like a closing judgment rather than an invitation to keep learning. In the perfect world, the design of any academic course would include multiple feedback loops: practice opportunities followed by personalized feedback, followed by more practice informed by that feedback, and so on. Leveraging group feedback, peer-feedback, and self-assessment, as well as tech tools designed to deliver just-in-time feedback data, can help instructors engage students in iterative, feedback-informed practice in any course.

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Grading

Perhaps no aspect of the teaching craft is as fraught as grading. Many instructors count grading among their least favorite teaching tasks–or delegate it to TA graders altogether. Putting a number (or letter) on a student’s performance can feel reductive and unsatisfying. Grading curves appear unfair to many students and tend to promote a culture of scarcity-based competition. In spite of our efforts at objectivity, research shows that much grading is arbitrary. What is worse, grades have been shown to undermine intrinsic motivation and produce the kind of instrumental relationship with learning we often lament. In spite of these many problems, most of us need to assign grades at the end of every term, so it is important to mitigate the negative effects of grades on learning and make our grading schemas as useful, transparent, and inclusive as possible.

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