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| Aligning Assessment with Intended Learning Outcomes |
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| Introduction |
Given that all-roundedness and professional competence are intended outcomes for all programmes:
- How do we assess professional competence?
- How do we assess the outcomes for all-roundedness set forth in the Strategic Objective 1?
This section attempts to guide you to:
- Appreciate how assessment design relates to curriculum design, as well as teaching and learning
design in an outcome-oriented educational framework.
- Recognise a broad range of assessment options open to your selection.
- Make informed selection of assessment methods appropriate for your programme.
- Convincingly justify your assessment design to programme reviewers inside and outside PolyU.
- Formulate meaningful criteria to assess learning outcomes in various domains - professional
knowledge, generic skills, and attitudes, etc.
- Design rubrics to provide feedback to students and to enhance the teaching and learning process.
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| Designing Your Assessment Plan |
Effective assessment is inseparable from good teaching and learning. Just as a good teacher would use
more than one method of teaching, a programme or a subject would normally employ more than one
method of assessment. Furthermore, assessment activities, like teaching, are also carried out at
different times throughout the semester so we can know how students are learning. An assessment
plan lays out a well thought out selection of assessment methods that are aligned to the objectives and
outcomes of the subject or programme. To help you evaluate your assessment plan, we suggest using
the three check questions for exemplary assessment design. |
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| Selecting Appropriate Assessment Methods for Intended Learning Outcomes |
Not every assessment method is universally valid for every type of learning outcome. For example, if
an intended outcome for a Computer Programming course is to 'be able to design and develop webenabled
software components using Java,' you cannot measure this outcome by asking the student to
write an essay. Similarly most generic outcomes, with the exception of language competencies, cannot
be assessed by objective tests.
In order to align assessment with a particular type of learning outcome, you need to select an
appropriate method of assessment. In the following we shall introduce a range of different assessment
methods and discuss their appropriateness for different types of outcome.
A university education goes beyond mastering factual knowledge into higher order thinking skills and
real world competencies. We want to develop a student's ability to think critically and creatively and
to solve problems. Thus, assessment methods which focus on lower-cognitive skills like memory are
far less justifiable here. Instead, we need to design tests, exams, or assignments that can engage our
students in thinking and doing things that will be valuable beyond their academic lives. |
| Recommended check question: What outcomes (in terms of level of understanding) are assessed? |
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| Assessing Professional Competence with Authentic Assessment |
In other sections, it is clearly explained that professional competence involves functioning abilities
which are founded on a high level of understanding of academic knowledge and relevant procedural
knowledge. Therefore, when selecting the assessment methods, we have to ensure they are able to
assess the functioning abilities so as to develop students with competence in the professional context.
The real professional context, which is highly performance-based, is a complicated mixture of illdefined
problems, uncertainties and unexpected outcomes that demand teamwork efforts, leadership
and diverse solutions, etc. It is difficult to create a real professional context in the classroom. Yet,
teachers can bring in authentic assessments to ask students to demonstrate functioning knowledge and
skills by performing real-world or near real-world tasks, using real-world tools, in a real-world
context, and judged by real-world standards. This may sound rather unrealistic. However, when we
design our assessment plan, we should keep these in mind to make our assessment as authentic as
possible. When students are doing the authentic assessment tasks, such as projects and placement,
students virtually gain real-world experience through the integration of different kinds of classroom
knowledge to solve the real problems in the near real-world situation. |
| Recommended check question: How authentic is the task? |
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| Using Assessment for Both Grading and Support Learning |
Take a minute to consider: 'What is the function of assessment?' Many colleagues may immediately
respond that it is for giving grades to students. Indeed, this is an important function of assessment and
educators call this 'summative' assessment. Summative assessment is usually carried out at the end of
a subject or after the conclusion of a major topic. Therefore both the final examination and quizzes
given during the term are summative assessments - as long as they are administered mainly for
grading purposes.
Besides its grading function, assessment is a powerful instrument for learning. Recent research in
education focuses a lot on using assessment creatively to enhance learning (Gibbs, 1995). The design
of the questions asked in the assessment will send messages to the students about what kinds of
learning are encouraged. For example, open-ended questions encourage students to move beyond
book knowledge into the broader subject context. On the other hand, an over-dependence on objective
tests promotes a culture of rote learning and memorisation.
Hence when designing your overall assessment plan, you should view it not only as building in check
points to give grades to students, but to consider it integrally as part of the learning process for the
students. It is important to see the assessment as an instrument for promoting desirable learning. |
| Recommended check question: What kind of learning is promoted? |
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| Continuous Assessment or Terminal examination? |
| A common concern among colleagues when making decisions about the assessment plan is the
percentage weightings to be assigned to continuous assessment (also called coursework) and to the
final examination. The choice between continuous assessment or terminal examination should
therefore be considered in the light of whether they are appropriate for the intended learning outcomes,
whether they are appropriately scheduled for providing feedback etc. |
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| Check Questions for Teaching and Learning Plan |
In summary, keep asking the following questions about your assessment plan:
- What outcomes (level of understanding/ performance) are assessed?
- How authentic is the task?
- What kind of learning is promoted?
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| Assessment Methods |
| This section explores different methods of assessment and uses the check questions to discuss
conditions justifying their use. Each assessment method has three elements: (1) A description of what
this method looks like in practice and its major variations; (2) Examples of how this method can be
used; and (3) Review alignment using the 3 check questions. The assessment methods will be
presented in this sequence: |
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