Leverage your Assessments: Make Learning Visible
When designed thoughtfully, assessments align with your learning objectives, provide students with opportunities to demonstrate their learning in authentic ways, offer constructive feedback, and inform your teaching decisions. The most powerful assessments feel like natural extensions of learning rather than isolated testing events.
Effective assessment plans include a balance of three types of assessment:
- Diagnostic assessment: Early and ongoing checks that help you understand students’ prior knowledge, misconceptions, and learning needs. These assessments support meaningful learning by informing your instructional decisions and ensuring that teaching is responsive to where students are starting and how their understanding develops over time.
- Formative assessment: Low-stakes check-ins that help students identify what they know and what they still need to work on, guiding their study efforts. Used regularly throughout the course, these assessments promote learning by providing timely feedback, motivating students to stay engaged, and helping them track their progress toward learning objectives as they work toward more complex tasks.
- Summative assessment: Higher-stakes evaluations that measure achievement of learning objectives at key points in the course, often at the end of a unit or learning cycle. In addition to evaluating overall performance, these assessments give students an opportunity to consolidate their learning and demonstrate their progress in meaningful ways.
In a nutshell, frequent formative assessments promote learning by providing ongoing feedback and helping students understand their progress, while summative assessments offer meaningful opportunities to demonstrate achievement of learning objectives and are typically scheduled at key milestones in the course. Diagnostic assessments complement both by identifying prior knowledge and learning needs, helping to ensure that instruction and support remain responsive throughout the learning process.
Effective assessment starts with understanding the different types and how they work together to support and measure learning.
| Formative Assessment: Assessment FOR Learning | Summative Assessment: Assessment OF Learning |
|---|---|
| Low-stakes activities that provide feedback to improve learning: | Higher-stakes evaluations that measure achievement: |
| Practice quizzes or problem sets Rough drafts with feedback In-class polls or discussions Self-assessment checklists Peer review activities | Final exams or midterms Major papers or projects Presentations or performances Portfolios demonstrating growth |
| Purpose: Help students identify gaps and guide their studying. Should be frequent and provide actionable feedback. | Purpose: Evaluate what students have learned. Should align directly with learning objectives and provide students opportunities to demonstrate mastery. |
Swim: Building Your Assessment Plan
Let’s design a comprehensive assessment system for your course. Work through these steps, considering both formative and summative assessments.
Step 1: Map Assessment to Learning Objectives
Start by listing your course-level learning objectives. For each objective, identify at least one summative assessment that will measure achievement:
Example Mapping
Objective: Students will be able to analyze historical documents for bias and perspective
Summative Assessment: Document analysis essay where students examine 3-5 primary sources and discuss how author perspective shapes the historical narrative
Formative Assessments: Weekly practice analyses with feedback, peer review sessions, in-class guided analysis activities
Step 2: Design Your Summative Assessments
For major assessments, consider these elements:
- What format best measures the objective? Papers, exams, projects, presentations, portfolios, performances?
- How will you evaluate quality? Develop rubrics that make criteria explicit
- What support will students need? Plan scaffolding and practice opportunities
- When should this occur? Time summative assessments to allow adequate preparation
Authentic Assessment Examples
Consider assessments that mirror professional or real-world tasks:
- Business: Develop a marketing plan for an actual local business
- Sciences: Design and conduct an original experiment following research protocols
- Education: Create and teach a lesson plan with peer observation
- Engineering: Solve an authentic design problem with constraints
Step 3: Build in Formative Assessment
Plan frequent, low-stakes opportunities for students to practice and receive feedback:
- Before each major assessment: Include at least 2-3 practice opportunities
- Weekly or more: Quick checks for understanding (polls, quizzes, discussions)
- Early in the course: Diagnostic assessment to understand student background
- Throughout: Self-assessment opportunities where students evaluate their own work
Formative Assessment Ideas
- Minute papers: Quick end-of-class reflections on key concepts
- Concept maps: Visual representations showing relationships between ideas
- Practice problems: Low-stakes problem sets with answer keys
- Peer feedback: Students evaluate each other’s work using rubrics
- Draft submissions: Preliminary versions that receive feedback before final grading
- Discussion contributions: Regular participation showing engagement with ideas
Step 4: Create Rubrics and Success Criteria
Make expectations transparent by developing clear evaluation criteria:
Effective Rubric Design
- Identify key dimensions: What aspects of performance matter most?
- Define performance levels: What does excellent, proficient, developing, and beginning look like?
- Use descriptive language: Avoid vague terms like “good” or “adequate”
- Focus on learning objectives: Rubric criteria should directly reflect what you’re assessing
- Share in advance: Students should see rubrics before completing assignments
Step 5: Balance Your Workload and Students’ Stress
Consider the practical realities of grading and student workload:
- Avoid clustering: Space major assessments throughout the term
- Prioritize what to grade: Not everything needs detailed feedback or grades
- Use efficient grading methods: Rubrics, commenting on common issues, peer evaluation
- Consider alternatives: Can some assessments be self-graded, pass/fail, or completion-based?
Deep Dive: Advanced Assessment Strategies
Once you have developed a well aligned assessment strategies and implemented it in your classroom with satisfying feedback from your students, you may consider exploring sophisticated approaches to assessment that promote equity, reduce bias, and better support diverse learners.
Here are links to some commonly adapted strategies seemed at UBC. Instead of revamping your entire assessment strategies, you may consider elements of these approaches that work best for your teaching context.
- Universal Design for Learning (provide link)
- Authentic Assessment for Learning Transfer (link)
- Metacognitive and Reflective Assessment (provide link)
- Ungrading and other similar grading approaches (provide link)
You may also want to consider these grading practices to promote equitable assessment:
- Blind grading
- Drop lowest scores
- Fair late policy
- Revision opportunities
- Focus on learning rather than the specific products
Key Takeaways
Want to join a course design cohort?
The Centre for Teaching Learning and Technology (CTLT) hosts annual course design programming.
Consider joining the Journey into Course Design (a two-day workshop where you will explore the four stages of course design: reflecting on situational factors, writing learning outcomes, considering assessment options, and exploring instructional strategies to support learners), or the Course Design Intensive for faculty (a multiday course design program where you will will work in an a supportive atmosphere, both individually and collaboratively, to design or redesign a UBC credit course that you teach or are planning to teach.)
