assessing students learning

How do you know if your students are achieving your specific learning goals for a course? Class evaluations and observations provide excellent feedback about student satisfaction and teaching style, but they don’t provide the important detail of how much your students are learning. Changing the way you assess student learning can dramatically improve your teaching effectiveness, as it provides immediate feedback on what works and what doesn’t.Traditionally, many teachers have evaluated their students’ knowledge by giving examinations and papers, often only at the middle and end of the quarter. As a result, a professor lecturing to a large introductory class might not recognize until final exams are finished that students consistently confused two important and closely related ideas. Other professors, who track their students’ work more regularly—through problem sets, for example— might assume that such written homework is helping achieve a major goal of the course, such as to develop students’ general problem-solving ability. Yet students who do well on homework might be unable to apply their knowledge to the novel situations created for exams; they’ve learned how to follow the textbook examples without understanding larger principles of problem solving.In recent years, instructors in a variety of fields have developed techniques of in-course assessment (also called classroom assessment). In-course assessment techniques systematize the process of getting useful and timely feedback on student learning. Because these assessment techniques are designed to gauge the effectiveness of the teaching and the quality of the learning taking place (and not simply to see who is or isn’t studying), they are usually anonymous. These anonymous assignments typically can be completed quickly, and focus on three areas:

1. students’ academic skills and intellectual development (e.g., do students have sufficient background knowledge or academic skills to move onto the next topic?)

1. students’ assessments of their own learning skills (e.g., do students feel prepared to learn new material from the textbook, without classroom review?)

1. students' reactions to various teaching methods, materials, and assignments (e.g., do students believe the exams fairly cover the material stressed in class?).

Based on this feedback, faculty can adjust their teaching to help students learn. The following are some examples of assessment techniques you might consider using: