Creating good assessments begins with developing learning objectives. What are the purposes of assessment?
- Improve student learning
- Identify students’ strengths and weaknesses
When you were a student did you ever have an instructor who lectured on one thing and tested on another? You can avoid that type of dilemma by writing learning objectives and aligning your assessments with them. At its most basic form, according to Robert Mager, the “father” of objectives, “an instructional objective is a collection of words and/or pictures and diagrams intended to let others know what you intend for your students to achieve.” Specifically objectives are:
- related to intended instructional outcomes, rather the process of instruction,
- specific and measurable, rather than broad and intangible
- concerned with student learning, not teacher behavior.
So how do you start constructing assessments for your course?
- Identify learning goals and measurable objectives
- Use Bloom’s Taxomony of Educational Objectives to identify the type of learning you want to measure. (http://www.schreyerinstitute.psu.edu/Tools/LearningObj/)
- The three upper levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy (analysis, synthesis, and evaluation) are linked to critical thinking
- Match your assessment with the objective
- As a general rule, if you want students to recall, interpret or apply information, multiple choice tests can work.
- If you want students to analyze, synthesize or evaluate, open-ended items like essays, papers, presentations, projects, etc. are more appropriate.
Six levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy
(Martell & Calderon, 2005); (Walvoord & Anderson, 1998)