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Considerations for Assessment Design

A guide on creating assessments and designing exam questions

At a Glance

Some key takeaways on assessment design:

  • Instructors can use assessments to test student learning and understanding of concepts throughout a course.
  • When designing assessments, instructors should consider course learning objectives and implement assessments and grading structures that fairly and effectively evaluate student learning.
  • Common assessment types include exams, quizzes, presentations, papers, and creative assignments.
  • This page offers guidance on how instructors may select appropriate assessment types and design assessments that cultivate student learning.

Benefits

Recommendations

Examples

References

Benefits

Well-designed assessments can provide instructors and their students with evidence of how well the students have learned what an instructor has intended them to learn (Graham & Simpson, 2005). What instructors want students to learn and be able to do guides the choice and design of the assessment. Aligning assessments with learning objectives increases the probability that instructors give students the opportunity to learn and practice the knowledge and skills that will be required on the various assessments designed. When assessments and objectives are aligned, students can achieve the learning outcomes of any given course (Utaberta and Hassanpour, 2012).

Megan Licskai is a woman with dark brown hair and wearing a gray plaid suit jacket.

“Thoughtful assessment design gives students the freedom to explore things they are passionate about within the structure necessary to help them develop the core skills of the discipline. One of the most rewarding parts of teaching is helping students determine the projects that are exciting to them and then working with them over the course of the semester to produce their best possible work and develop new skills.”

—

Megann Licskai, Ph.D, Lecturer in History

Recommendations

When deciding what type of assessment to use, consider the following questions:

  1. Define the goal(s) of the assessment. What specific knowledge or skills are you evaluating? What do you want students to learn or be able to do?
  2. What opportunities will each assessment type offer to demonstrate students’ approach and understanding?

Effective summative assessments seek to evaluate students’ understanding and processing of course material as opposed to rote memorization skills. By designing assessments that require students to explain their approach, logic, or thinking, instructors can also increase academic integrity.

If you are planning to administer an exam, consider including short answer or essay questions that ask students to apply specific concepts, rather than asking for definitions. These questions can demonstrate students’ approach to understanding course material and promote deeper levels of processing. Multiple choice questions can also be adapted to ask students to explain how they came to an answer. The Poorvu Center also provides additional recommendations on designing exam questions. 

Written work, research papers, annotated portfolios, and presentations also allow students to engage deeply with course material and demonstrate their understanding. These assessment types are particularly common in the humanities and social sciences.

Altering the grading system to provide credit for students’ learning as they go through the semester (i.e., formative assessments) as opposed to high stakes assessments at the middle and end of courses (i.e., summative assessment) can be especially beneficial. Smaller assignments or quizzes allow students to study material more deeply. They also enable instructors to provide feedback on student learning with enough time for students to adjust their studying, and they reduce student anxiety compared to having a low number of high stakes exams.

Instructors should also clarify assessment expectations and grading structures when describing the exam or assignment. For exams and quizzes, instructors should explain the breakdown and nature of questions, as well as whether material from the entire course or just a certain unit will be tested. For short answer and essay items, as well as other assessment types such as papers and projects, instructors should present rubrics that explain what students must do to meet expectations for each grade bracket. You should also explain how the assessment will be weighted relative to other components of the class grade.

Depending on the type of assessment that you choose, consider utilizing one of the following educational technology tools to streamline collection, grading, and feedback. 

  • Canvas Assignments: Canvas Assignments is a native Canvas tool that allows instructors to collect and score student papers, projects, presentations, and other work for grading.
  • Turnitin: Turnitin integrates with Canvas Assignments to compare student papers against a wide range of sources, to generate a report highlighting passages in the submitted paper that have phrasing similar to published material. 
  • Canvas Quizzes: Canvas Quizzes is a Canvas native tool where instructors can add multiple questions to a single quiz.  Question types can contain auto-scored items (multiple choice, multiple select, true/false, ranking, etc.) and manually-scored questions (fill-in-the-blanks, essay/short answers, etc.). 
  • Gradescope: Gradescope is a tool designed to streamline and standardize paper-based, digital, and code assignments. It supports problem sets and projects as well as worksheets, quizzes, exams, and papers. Gradescope is a great tool for automating the grading of open-ended items. This Canvas plug-in tool can be particularly useful in large courses where scoring open-ended items can be time challenging.

When using a new tool for the first time, it is advisable to have a low or no-stakes practice version of the exam ahead of time so that students can practice using the tools beforehand.

Examples of Common Assessment Types

These tabs feature a brief and non-exhaustive list of possible assessments that instructors may use throughout or at the end of a course.

  • Exams can be administered synchronously in the classroom or asynchronously online through Canvas, which offers opportunities for students to complete timed and untimed exams.
  • Refer to the Poorvu Center’s page on designing exam questions.
  • For quantitative or equation focused exams, consider using the Canvas assignments tool for students to upload their written work. Alternatively, instructors can provide students with a visual model or equation with an intentionally missing portion or error and ask students to explain the error, its implications, and correct it. Another approach is to have students generate a test-item for a selected topic, explain the importance of the topic, identify and explain the correct answer to their question, and potentially provide rationale for their incorrect answers.
  • You can foster academic integrity by using approaches that ask students to explain their thinking, apply their understanding to a new task, or organize their knowledge in a new way. Present clear guidelines about whether or not students can use resources for the exam or collaborate with each other.

  • Instructors may ask students to deliver live or recorded presentations to assess their learning. As part of the assessment, you may ask students to prepare presentation slides.
  • If you prefer to have students pre-record their presentations, you may ask them to record a presentation via Zoom and share the recording link on Canvas or email it. Instructors have the option to share presentations with others in the class if peer feedback is part of the assignment. Instructors may create a video assignment folder allowing students to upload videos created in Zoom, Panopto or most any other video file.
  • Share a rubric with students as they prepare for the presentation so that they are aware of expectations and criteria for each grade bracket.

  • Papers and written assignments allow students to explore deeply material covered in class or apply course concepts to new material.
  • Students may submit their written assignments and receive instructor feedback through email or Canvas.
  • To facilitate peer feedback, students may exchange documents and feedback via email, over Zoom or via Canvas peer review.
  • Instructors may also encourage students to visit The Writing Center to discuss their work with writing partners or tutors as they brainstorm and draft.
  • For group assignments, consider using Google Drive to facilitate simultaneous work on a single document. Canvas Groups also offer opportunities to set up collaborative spaces.
  • Instructors may consider allowing students to demonstrate their knowledge through more innovative writing formats, such as interviews, news articles, archives, or creative projects. 
  • Share a rubric with students as they draft the paper so that they are aware of expectations and criteria for each grade bracket.

References & Resources

Gibbs, Graham and Simpson, Claire (2005) Conditions Under Which Assessment Supports Students’ Learning. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (1). pp. 3-31.

Utaberta, Nangkula and Hassanpour, Badiossadat (2012) Aligning Assessment with Learning Outcomes. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences:  60, pp. 228-235. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2012.09.372 

  1. The Poorvu Center has a resource on formative and summative assessments.
  2. Indiana University Bloomington’s Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning provides a guide to alternatives to traditional exams and papers.