Teaching Tip: Assessment Blueprint | Academic Newsletter | Seneca Polytechnic

by Linda Facchini, the Teaching & Learning Centre

in the June 2020 issue

Do the recent changes to course delivery at Seneca have you thinking about assessment and how to adapt your tests and assignments? A good place to start is by creating an assessment blueprint.

An assessment blueprint maps out the assessment methods and strategies in your course. Creating an assessment plan ensures that the evaluation of students’ performance is comprehensive, fair, and balanced. Communicating this plan at the start of your course allows students to understand what is expected of them and enables them to prepare their best work.

^{Key Elements of an Assessment Blueprint}

Here are some important considerations that go into an assessment plan:

Provide ongoing and meaningful feedback to students about their progress and development. Assessment is about more than awarding grades. It is a continuous process with the goal of understanding student learning in order to improve it. Assessments, and accompanying feedback, should be distributed throughout a course at regular intervals to allow students to learn from past performance.

Align assessments with learning outcomes. Assessments measure how well students can demonstrate the course learning outcomes. Each learning outcome should map to at least one assessment.

Provide more than one opportunity to demonstrate each outcome. If possible, give students several occasions to show what they have learned and how they have improved. This will provide a more accurate picture of their achievement of course learning goals.

Make assessments appropriately varied. Using a variety of assessment methods suitable to the subject matter ensures that students are evaluated on their knowledge and skills related to the learning goals, and not on their ability to take a test. Consider assessments that require students to write, speak, perform, or create as appropriate.

Reflect the skills required of graduates in the field. You can make course material more interesting and engaging to students by designing assessments that recreate the tasks they will be performing as part of a “real job.” Authentic tasks require students to interact deeply with the content and can evaluate several skills at once.

Include assessments “for, of, and as” learning. Not all assessments are graded evaluations “of” student learning. In your blueprint, use regular, ungraded formative assessments (or check-ins) “for” learning what students do and do not understand during a lesson in order to adapt your teaching process. And include ungraded assessments that allow students to reflect on their own progress “as” they learn.

Distribute graded assessments reasonably. Give students ample time to complete assignments and study for tests. Return a minimum of 30% of their final grade to students at least one week before the course drop date. And make sure no single assessment is worth more than 40% of the total evaluation.

For more information on assessment strategies and methods, including an Assessment Blueprint template, visit the Assessment resources on The Teaching & Learning Centre website.

References

View the June 2020 issue of the Academic Newsletter.