Assessments refer to the course assignments and activities that measure student achievement of learning outcomes and allow student practice with course skills. They include the coursework that students submit to you and to one another for review, feedback, or grading. Assessments signal your values as an educator because they show what you want to spend time exploring with your students.

When assessments are designed to be equitable, it means that they meet the needs of students who historically have been denied learning opportunities, support, or access that are traditionally offered to students from dominant cultures and identities. As Sasha Costanza-Chock writes, “Some people are always advantaged and others disadvantaged by any given design… This distribution is influenced by intersecting structures of race, class, gender, and disability.” Costanza-Chock calls on educators to “prioritize design work that shifts advantages to those who are currently systematically disadvantaged within the matrix of domination,” or to become “design justice practitioners” (Costanza-Chock, 2020).

Equitable assessments deliberately shift design benefits to those groups who are disenfranchised by powerful social, economic, and political systems. In this unit, your challenge is to shift design benefits further than you ever have before.

Culturally Responsive Teaching

Before we continue to the how-tos of assessment, we’ll explore Culturally Responsive Teaching, which is one of the ways that we view curriculum design through an equity lens in the matrix we shared in Year 2, Unit 1. This is a framework that particularly supports learning for students with disabilities, students who are first-generation college students, students of color, and students who historically have been excluded from institutions of higher education.

Culturally Responsive Teaching asks educators to recognize and name systems of oppression at work in social institutions, where the voices and histories of people of color and marginalized groups are often hidden or erased. Instead of choosing learning objectives and assignments that accept whitewashed histories and ways of knowing, Culturally Responsive Teaching deliberately turns to the expertise and interventions developed by people from marginalized communities.

Culturally Responsive Teaching means creating opportunities for students to analyze content through the lens of their own experiences. A culturally responsive course invites the voices and expertise of diverse scholars and leaders into the content itself. Using Culturally Responsive Teaching strategies meets both of our Representation of Diverse Voices criteria for success: Assessments allow students to integrate their lived experiences with course content and Course content includes representation of diverse community stakeholders.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E68yPb0v1eQ&t=66s

Without culturally responsive teaching, educators often reproduce the assumptions and attitudes about learning from their own educational experiences. For this reason, Culturally Responsive Teaching often begins with reflection on your own attitudes and beliefs about cultural differences. In practice, this may be the work of an entire career, not a single unit in a course design training. Whether this framework is new to you or you are an experienced practitioner of Culturally Responsive Teaching, we want to normalize taking an incremental approach to implementing it in your course design.

One important way to integrate culturally responsive teaching into your assessments is through meaningful peer-to-peer interaction. Discussion forums, group work, games, and peer-led teaching shift classroom authority from the instructor to the learning community itself. These strategies ask instructors to yield some of their own power to students, which can feel uncomfortable at first. If this approach is new to you, talk with your Instructional Designer about what kind of peer-to-peer interaction might feel comfortable to you. This practice meets our Learner Focus, Representation of Diverse Voices, and Oregon Context criteria for success: Assessments include low-stakes, frequent opportunities for students to test new skills and knowledge, Assessments allow students to integrate their lived experiences with course content, and Course activities include opportunities for meaningful peer-to-peer interaction.

Our textbook manuscripts were also drafted with Culturally Responsive Teaching as a key framework. To read or review how we approached this topic with our textbook authors, visit Year 1, Unit 5.

Planning for Assessment in Your Course Map

Culturally responsive assessments create room for multiple ways of expressing knowledge. Rather than sticking to one dominant cultural framework, culturally responsive assessments prioritize diverse ways for students to show what they know. To honor multiple ways of knowing, instructors need to be flexible in their design thinking. For example, students may come from communal cultures, where the needs of the group are prioritized over the needs of the individual. Students may also carry expectations for interpersonal relationships that work against dominant academic assumptions of competition or individual achievement (Sam et al., n.d.).

Designing both formative and summative assessments allow you to build more flexibility into your curriculum. These two types of assessments are represented in the columns of your {Instructor} {Course #} Course Map document. The table in figure Y2 3.3 defines and contrasts them.

Sometimes instructors skip over formative assessments and assign only summative assignments to reduce grading time. While this might be efficient for the instructor, students struggle to get practice, feedback, and the chance to learn from their mistakes. Formative assessments are key to regular, sustained interaction with you as an educator. Formative assessments also show students where they need to improve and challenge them to take responsibility for their learning. Incorporating formative assessments meets our Learner Focus criteria for success: Assessments include low-stakes, frequent opportunities for students to test new skills and knowledge.

Both formative and summative assessments provide opportunities for meaningful peer-to-peer interaction. You might ask students to pair up and discuss ideas from their journal entries together at the start of class, or provide feedback on drafts of one another’s projects. Any time you ask students to work together, it is helpful to be clear about your reason for collaboration. Helping students to understand the why behind an activity increases their motivation and improves overall performance. Culturally responsive instruction means inviting students to learn from one another out of respect for each person’s expertise and capacity for inquiry. This also meets one of our Learner Focused criteria for success: Assessments allow for multiple means of student expression (text, video, discussion, creative work).

Be sure to fill in the Instructor Feedback column to show how students will know how well they did with each assignment. As you fill in the Instructor Feedback column, consider: Do you already provide a grading rationale in your syllabus that lists all your assignment formats and explains why you use the assessment types you use? If not, it is an excellent transparency move to prepare a short paragraph describing your choices. Your instructional designer can help you with this task during your design meeting.

Scoping Assessments for the 10-week Term

Assessment design is often both invigorating and frustrating. What you want your students to achieve somehow needs to fit within the available weeks of the term, which are short ten-week quarters in Oregon. Scoping and scaffolding assessments – deciding on the right amount of required work, the opportunity for student agency and choice, the order of assignments to help students meet a goal, and the necessary support they’ll need to get there – is a complex process.

As you plan your assessments, aim for a total number of assignments to meet the hours of expected student work based on your course credits. The U.S. Department of Education recommends 1 hour of class plus 2 hours of work per credit hour, though policies may vary by institution (United States Department of Education, 2010). For support in estimating course workload, review Dr. Betsy Barre’s Workload Estimator 2.0 [Website]. The tool draws on evidence-based practices and research in student engagement. While estimates are always just that – estimates – this tool can help instructors to scope assignment load appropriately.

Consider that students need time to complete bigger assignments over multiple weeks. Your design should break down assignments so that no one waits until the last minute to complete any major work. If you split up big assignments into a practical sequence of smaller, incremental parts, you will improve the quality of student work and everyone’s mood. Set parameters so that students can realistically complete big assignments over the term.

Note, too, that the first week of the term is usually atypical in workload as students need to orient to course expectations and grading rationale, complete introductory tasks with their peers, engage in preliminary course content, and learn how to navigate and submit work on the course site. Students may join the class late or may delay their engagement with content in favor of orienting to the course requirements and policies. We recommend building in flexibility in completing first week tasks.

Scaffolding Assessments

If you follow the backwards design process that we recommend, then your last step is to identify the lecture topics, readings, videos, and other resources that will provide students with the support they need to successfully complete all assignments, meet the unit-level learning objectives, and demonstrate that they have succeeded in the course outcomes. These resources are part of your course scaffolding. Use the last column of your course map to fill in the resources you already know you’ll plan to use (it’s OK if your plan isn’t complete yet, because we come back to this in the next unit).

Scaffolding is the process of determining the type and timing of instructional support that students will need to accomplish a new task. Students come to your learning community with varying prior knowledge and varying skill levels to perform and engage in course concepts. Scaffolds can be used to support students when they begin to work on objectives that are more complex or difficult to complete.

For example, if students are asked to complete a major paper by the end of the term, the steps to complete the project will be scaffolded into early, middle, and later weeks across the term. Instead of assuming all students know how to begin the process of writing a paper, the instructor would break the project into smaller, more manageable parts:

1. The instructor provides an outline of the components of the paper.
2. Students prepare their outlines and potentially receive feedback from the instructor or one another.
3. The instructor provides a rubric of how each paper criteria will be assessed.
4. Students work on those criteria and, at the same time, self-evaluate their progress.
5. The pattern continues until the task is completed (although scaffolds might not be necessary in all parts of the task).

Knowing your students well will help you scaffold assessments. Plan to use scaffolds on topics that former students had difficulty with or with material that is especially challenging. The following can be used as guidelines when implementing scaffolding:

• Consider students’ backgrounds and prior knowledge to assess their progress – material that is too easy will quickly bore students and reduce motivation. On the other hand, material that is too difficult can turn off students’ interest levels.
• Use a variety of supports as students progress through a task (e.g., prompts, questions, hints, stories, models, or multimedia).
• Provide encouragement and ask questions to help students stay focused on the goal.
• Monitor student progress through feedback (in addition to instructor feedback, have students summarize what they have accomplished so they are aware of their progress and what they have yet to complete).
• Create a welcoming, safe, and supportive learning environment that encourages students to take risks and try alternatives (everyone should feel comfortable expressing their thoughts without fear of negative responses). (Hogan and Pressley, 1997)

Scaffolding motivates learners to become better students because it explicitly models learning how to learn. Including scaffolds is also a concrete sign that an instructor is inviting students into a welcoming and caring learning environment.

Licenses and Attributions for Drafting Course Assessments

Open content, original

“Drafting Course Assessments” by Open Oregon Educational Resources is licensed CC BY 4.0.

Open content, shared previously

Figure Y2 3.4. “Soft Melting Clock” by Dennis van Zuijlekom is licensed CC BY-SA 2.0.

“Scaffolding Assessments” is adapted from Instructional Scaffolding to Improve Learning by Northern Illinois University Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning, licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

References