Oct 13: 6. Assessment and feedback. How do you know what your students are learning, and how do your students get feedback on what they do or do not understand? How best to use assessment and testing to further the goals of your course? How should you grade and give feedback on tests & assignments? Formative versus summative assessment, and their optimal design and uses.

National Research Council, Knowing What Students Know: The Science and Design of Educational Assessment (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2001), part of chapter 6 (“Assessment in Practice”, 221-241), KWSK ch 6.pdf
Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, Harvard University, “How to Write an Effective Assignment” [webpage] (2020) and associated nested pages, Bok.pdf
Optional: Bethany Blackstone and Elizabeth Oldmixon, “Specifications Grading in Political Science,” Journal of Political Science Education 15 (2019), 191-205, Blackstone Oldmixon 2019.pdf
Optional: Emory College Online Faculty Hub [Canvas site], "Assessment Overview" (2020) [access may be gated to registered instructors], ECOTS.pdf

Learning Objectives

Describe some of the important considerations, from learning theory & sciences, about assessment, and explain the basis for their importance
Identify a set of practical assessment approaches you might use in your courses of different types, and explain the learning sciences basis for these approaches
Evaluate the quality of assessment you have participated in as a student and instructor in the past/present

Questions for Discussion

The NRC volume chapter argues that, while assessment has many purposes, the most important is this: “to educate and improve student performance, not merely to audit it” (221). Would you agree? Explain.
What are some key things we learned from these readings?
Analyze & evaluate formative assessment designs & techniques. What works best, and for what purposes and under what conditions? This is a process the teacher needs to regularly put into practice.
Identify one learning objective in a class you are teaching or might teach.
- How best to assess whether the students have learned that?
- How would you grade that, provide feedback on it?
- How would the results affect what you do as a teacher moving forward, what the student does?
How to build a classroom culture of belief that whole class can and should succeed, vs seeing learning as a competition and the aim as being to differentiate dumb from smart?
How to embed opportunities for active learning & metacognition into formative assessment?
How to diagnose & properly characterize, then customize interventions for, varying individual prior beliefs/knowledge/perspectives that account for ‘errors’ in formative assessment tasks?
How many assignments should we be giving, in what format, and how frequently?
How would you assess performance of your course as a whole, in meeting its learning objectives? Of your curriculum and department’s teachers as a whole? How to judge if someone is a ‘good teacher’, or if the Department’s curriculum is ‘good’?