When you are designing the assessments for your course, you’ll need to decide what kind of assignments students will complete and ensure that these assignments align with the GLOs and SLOs in your course. You’ll also need to write the assignment instructions and then write sample answers or provide answer keys for these assignments (to the extent it’s possible).
While there are some similarities between assignments and learning activities, there is a key difference in terms of design: assignments/assessments measure the extent to which students have achieved satisfactory mastery of the course’s learning outcomes and form part of the student’s overall grade in the course; learning activities should be designed to engage with the course’s learning outcomes but are ungraded activities.
For example, you might hold an in-class discussion on a topic, or ask students to watch a video in class, or put students in small groups to discuss a current issue, but whether or not a student participates has no impact on their grade because they don’t submit any work based on these activities. This is a learning activity.
By contrast, you might design an online discussion forum in Moodle with questions that students are expected to answer. If a student doesn’t participate to a satisfactory level, they lose 5% of their grade. This activity is an assignment/assessment and requires the developer to provide written instructions and a rubric. We might also consider it a low-stakes assignment because it’s only worth 5%.
What follows are some tips and suggestions on designing the assessment component of your course(s).
Assignments test or assess lower-order skills or they test higher-order skills. Assignments are, therefore, either low-stakes or high-stakes.
Usually, low-stakes assignments test lower-order skills. We call these “low stakes” assignments because they are worth less in terms of the student’s overall grade. They provide a kind of “in the moment” feedback on learning and test a student’s mastery of simpler, more straight-forward skills or concepts.
By contrast, higher-stakes assignments include opportunities for students to construct or create responses, apply their learning in new ways, and extend their learning in meaningful and creative ways. In these summative assignments, there is often more than one correct or right answer. Higher-stakes assessments are worth a greater percentage of the student’s overall grade.
Note that many of the lower-stakes assignment suggestions below could also appear as ungraded learning activities in the course. However, you wouldn’t likely assign higher-stakes assignments as learning activities, given the level of engagement that higher-stakes assessments require (ex: you would never assign a research paper that was ungraded and “just for practice”).
Some examples of lower-stakes assignments include:
Some example of higher-stakes assignments include:
Once you’ve decided on the kind of assessment activity you’d like to assign, you need to design the components. The following checklist outlines the kinds of considerations you’ll need to undertake as you design your assessments:
You will be required to develop rubrics for your assignments, but we will discuss guidelines for doing so in a different document.
Many of your assignments will ask students to consider complex or multi-faceted issues, ideas, and discussion points. Especially when testing higher-order skills, you’ll want to avoid questions that have “black and white” answers. Whether you are setting a research paper question or setting up a discussion forum in Moodle, consider how you can support students to engage with higher-order thinking.
Higher-order thinking is supported by questions, tasks, and problem-solving:
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