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Home > Degree Programs > Teaching & Courses > Teaching > SLATE > Assessing Your Students
Assessing Your Students
For information or questions about assessing your students, please contact Carolyn Wood, Assistant Academic Dean and Director of SLATE.
Assignments and exams are often a significant component of asessing students. The below summary that was written by James Wilkinson for the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, Harvard University.
Below are four main tips for designing assignments and exams:
- Decide on a small number of “desired outcomes” for your course.
- Align your assignments and exams with your desired outcomes.
- Offer students a rationale for the choices you make in assigned readings.
- Many short assignments and exams spread throughout the semester produce better learning than a long paper and final exam at the end, especially if returned with adequate comments.
Assignments and examinations play a crucial and, it should be stressed, pedagogical role in any course. The care that goes into crafting lectures and discussions is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for effective teaching learning. Examinations, in particular, seem the step-children of the educational process. And yet, more than any other single factor, they shape what students will focus on in a course.
Derek Bok notes in Our Underachieving Colleges that students "study with an eye toward the kinds of questions they expect to see on their exams; as a result, instructors need to reinforce the aims of their courses by taking care to construct exams that call for the very kinds of thinking that they most want to encourage." (pp. 120-21)
A key to creating effective assignments and exams is the concept of “alignment.” As defined by Ralph Tyler almost fifty years ago, alignment simply means starting with the “desired outcomes” of the course and working backwards so that the assignments and examinations reflect and support them. In some sense a successful course can be considered as an exercise in reverse engineering. Figure out first where you want your students to end up, and (only) then how best to help them get there.
The alignment principle would suggest that whatever is on the test should faithfully reflect the themes and materials most frequently stressed during the semester. Examinations should never be an afterthought. Nor, if the course is repeated more than once, should they be simply carbon copies of those administered the year before. Ideally, examinations should allow the instructor to gauge student learning. This is one reason why take-home examinations and examination substitutes such as research papers have become more commonly used in recent years. At their worst, examinations simply test how adept students are at taking examinations, e.g. writing rapidly under time pressure. At their best, they help students process and review material that would otherwise remain unprocessed and unreviewed, and thus unlikely to wind up in students’ long-term memory stores.
Assignments and examinations not only send a signal to students about what the instructor considers worth learning in a course; they also serve to offer feedback on how well students are meeting course expectations. There is, in fact, a direct relationship between frequency (and quality) of feedback on the one hand, and student performance on the other. This is one reason why some courses now place such stress on paper drafts, and why short assignments like response papers and examinations like weekly quizzes are becoming more common. Students perform better with practice and, the more practice they have, the better they perform.
Giving Feedback to Students
Lee Warren prepared the following information for the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, Harvard University.
Grading and feedback are among the most powerful ways in which teachers communicate with students. They are interconnected tools for teachers to express what they think students should be learning, and for helping students make progress toward those goals. In order for students to understand and make use of grades and feedback, faculty and teaching fellows need to ensure:
- Purpose: Consider and tell students the purpose of both grades and feedback in any course. Are grades a measure of achievement? A comparison to other students? A comparison to an absolute standard? What should students do with the feedback they receive--incorporate it into the next assignment? Use it to study for exams? Employ it in later courses or research within their concentrations? Transparency about purpose helps students align their expectations and actions with those of their instructors.
- Clarity: Whatever grading standards are employed within a course should be set forth in the syllabus clearly, at the beginning of the term. When students do not know how they are being evaluated, grades become a game of guessing what the instructor wants, rather than learning the content and skills at the heart of the course. Likewise, feedback to students needs to be expressed clearly, offering an explanation of what students are doing well, what they need to work on, and how to go about improving.
- Consistency: Though it seems obvious, maintaining consistent grading standards across a large course can be challenging. Discussing the grading standards with the entire course staff, using a rubric, and cross-checking grading between section leaders are all good practices that can help. Likewise, instructors within a course must agree on the amount and type of feedback they will provide for students (written, verbal, quantitative, etc.).
Click here for additional information developed by the Bok Center on giving feedback to students.
Grading Student Assignments
In designing a course, the instructor should consider providing opportunities for students to submit written work or problem sets. While the main purpose is to give them the opportunity to respond to criticism and improve their work, it also allows the instructor to calculate the final grade on a broader basis than one or two exams or a term paper. Year after year, student surveys indicate that it is almost impossible to overstate the importance of thoughtful comments and quick turnaround, or the resentment of students whose assignments were returned after the exam rather than before it.
Feedback on Exams
If an instructor gives a less than perfect score on a question (e.g., 13/15), it pays to write a few words to explain why. That takes more time when grading, but less than one might think. The trick is to find just a couple of words to identify common errors -- which is one reason why it's usually more efficient to grade all the answers to one question before starting on another. Moreover, even a brief comment saves time later on, for it eliminates many student concerns about the way the exam was graded, while with those who still complain you don’t have to reread the exam to see why you took points off.
Responding to Student Writing
The Harvard College Writing Program website offers several online resources on the topic of responding to student writing including A Brief Guide to Responding to Student Writing.
Grading Group Assignments
TBD
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