Lesson 2: Determining the student assignment that will be assessed
Once you have mapped out the assessment rubrics that articulate the key areas students will be assessed in as well as what constitutes proficiency and mastery in each area, you now need to develop the assignment or assignments you will use to assess learning. For program-level assessment there are two key principles that you should incorporate.
1. The program-level assessment assignment should be completed by students in a capstone course or as a culminating experience. This means it should be done after students have finished the majority of their program coursework, i.e. in their senior year of college.
2. The rubric and assignment for program-level assessment should have students demonstrate their proficiency or mastery of the program content.
Best Practices for Program-Level Assessment Assignments
A major best practice of program-level assessment assignments is that they should be projects that ask students to grapple with messy, real-world problems that have multiple good solutions as opposed to formulaic problems that have only one correct answer,
Other best practices are...
- Assignments should function as a learning opportunity as well as an opportunity to see if students have mastered the SLOs. Students should be learning as they are completing the assignment, not just spitting back information on tests or quizzes.
- Assignments should be meaningful and worthwhile. Students should engage in active learning that requires significant time and effort as they work on projects that have personal and professional meaning to them.
- Assignments should be relevant and engaging. Giving students hands-on experience with a real�world problem will engage them more than listening to lectures, reading textbooks and regurgitating the information back on a test.
- Assessments should be challenging, yet realistic and attainable. Program-level assessment assignments should be designed to show how well students mastered the program content, They should integrate all the knowledge and skills that the student has learned across all the courses in their major. Therefore, the assignment should address the high-order thinking skills in Bloom's taxonomy, specifically application, analysis, evaluation and creation. However, make sure that what student are being asked to do is attainable given the knowledge and skills they have learned as well as the exposure and practice they have been given to the knowledge and skills.
Examples of Great Assignment Assessments
File:Assessment Assignments.pdf