Title: Online Assessments
Course: TOPkit Sample Course Lite > Section: Module 4 - Effective Online Assessments

Notes for Course Facilitator

Summary:

This page defines formal and informal assessments, provides instructional strategies and best practices for assessments, and offers suggestions for providing feedback to students.

Gentle reminder: Update all content highlighted in yellow to reflect your institution.

Introduction

As you move into the online environment, you have the opportunity to develop and create a multitude of assessments using new and innovative tools. Students will feel a strong sense of relevance to your course materials when you align your content objectives with your assessments. This section reviews two types of assessments, formal and informal, that can help shape how you assess your students online.

  1. Formal assessments provide a systematic way to measure students’ progress. These types of assessments also contribute to the final grade, which indicates a student’s mastery of the subject, e.g.,midterm, and finals.
  2. Informal Assessments generally provide the faculty member the ability to gauge their students’ comprehension of course material. It does not involve assigning grades. Furthermore, these can be used to allow students to practice the material prior to a formal assessment, e.g., self-tests.

Instructional Strategies & Best Practices: Formal Assessments

Quizzes/Tests

Multiple choice and short answer tests (or quizzes) are useful for assessing students' abilities to recognize and recall content. They are also fairly easy to grade; and when faced with a large class size, you can make the grading automatic depending on the question type. The following PDF documents will help guide you in creating quality multiple-choice questions:

- Using Bloom’s Taxonomy to Create Multiple-Choice Questions
- Question Improvement Suggestions
- Effective-Assessment-Examples

Essays/Academic Prompts

Assessments that require a subjective analysis are often more difficult and time consuming to grade; however, this type of assessment is appropriate for gauging how well students are able to apply the concepts learned in class.

Also, in <Replace - Your LMS>, there are a variety of tools to facilitate these types of assessments.

1. Discussions – often used for generating student-to-student interaction based on an instructor-specified critical thinking challenge.
2. Quizzes – used to construct essay-type questions (which must be manually scored).
3. Assignments – used to submit papers, essays, or other types of assignments.

Projects/Authentic Tasks

This type of assessment can be time-consuming for the student to complete (and often for the grader to grade) due to its complex, real-world applicability. However, such assessments are particularly well suited for assessing whether students have reached a deep understanding of core concepts and allow students the ability to personalize their learning.

Other examples and formats of authentic activities and assessments are provided below:

- Review examples of activities such as question types, concept expansion, answer defense, point of view, and serious games. (PPT)
- Review selected Pedagogies from FCTL ( e.g., e-portfolios).

Informal Assessments

Informal assessments are an integral part to any quality course. Faculty incorporate these types of assessments into their course to increase their presence in the online environment and to keep track of their students’ learning. Some sample strategies include:

- Incorporate one-minute papers submitted through the assignment tool.
- Conduct summative and formative evaluations by selecting the Survey option located within the Assessments tool.
- Create practice assessments or self-tests using the Assessments tool.

Providing Feedback to Your Students

Below are some strategies that you can use to facilitate effective feedback:

- Quiz question feedback in – provides an opportunity for faculty to indicate why answers are correct/incorrect.
- Discussion tool in - this tool provides the ability to offer feedback by responding to your students.
- After assessment feedback – provides an overview to the commonly missed questions. You can choose to deliver it in a variety of mediums [ e.g., the Announcement tool, course email, or as a personal webcast (video)].

Rubrics

Rubrics promote the fair and consistent grading of complex subjective material. They also provide a guideline to students regarding performance requirements and are a useful tool to provide valuable feedback. In addition, the Grading Forms featured within allow you to build rubrics for discussions and assignments.

Visit Teaching Online Pedagogical Repository to learn more about the strategy for using Rubrics in your online course.

Peer Review

Peer review provides another means for students to receive feedback and is based on a set of standards created by the instructor. Below are samples and strategies that can be used to incorporate peer review within your course:

- Writing center peer review process at Colorado State University
- Incorporating peer assessment in assignments at Cornell University

Optional Further Reading

If you would like more information related to assessments, check out the following references. Each contains a wealth of information that you will find helpful now and in the future.

- Hall, R. (2002). Aligning learning, teaching and assessment using the web: An evaluation of pedagogic approaches. British Journal of Educational Technology, 33 (2), 149-158. Retrieved fromhttp://search.epnet.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&an=7008973

Formal Assessments

- Andrade, H. G. (n.d.). Understanding Rubrics. Retrieved from http://www.saddleback.edu/uploads/goe/understanding_rubrics_by_heidi_goodrich_andrade.pdf
- Peat, M. (2000). Online assessment: The use of web based self-assessment materials to support self-directed learning. School of Biological Sciences, University of Sydney. Retrieved from http://otl.curtin.edu.au/professional_development/conferences/tlf/tlf2000/peat.html

Providing Feedback to Your Students

- Bostock, S. (2010). Student Peer Assessment. The Higher Education Academy. Retrieved, from http://www.reading.ac.uk/web/FILES/engageinassessment/Student_peer_assessment_-_Stephen_Bostock.pdf
- Dihoff, R., Brosvic, G., Epstein, M., Cook, M. (Spring, 2004). Provision of Feedback During Preparation for Academic Testing: Learning is Enhanced by Immediate But Not Delayed Feedback.Psychological Record; Vol. 54 Issue 2. Retrieved from http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst?docId=5008051594
- Falchikov, N., & Goldfinch, J. (2000). Student Peer Assessment in Higher Education: A Meta-Analysis Comparing Peer and Teacher Marks. Review of Educational Research. Retrieved fromhttp://rer.sagepub.com/content/70/3/287.full.pdf

TOPKit Sample Course was prepared by the University of Central Florida (UCF). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.