Designing effective digital assessment
Assessment, when done well, advances learning, provides actionable feedback for both students and faculty and provides accountability. When done well, digital formative and summative assessment improves authenticity and alignment with learning outcomes, can help clarify marking criteria, spreads the assessment load for staff and students and improves student engagement. Because digital assessment enables new and different kinds of assessment, it realises the potential not only of assessment itself, but also of your students, who are preparing for a lifetime in the digital workplace.
The important question, then, is how does one do digital assessment well? Undoubtedly, it involves clear and timely communication with students and careful planning and consideration to ensure fairness, validity, and alignment with learning outcomes. Based on our knowledge of best practices that we’ve seen used by institutions we support, here's a rundown of considerations to keep in mind:
By following these guidelines, faculty can create effective digital assessments that enhance the learning experience, accurately measure students' knowledge and skills and contribute to overall academic success.
1. Clear Learning Objectives:
As you would do with any assessment, start by defining clear and measurable learning objectives. Ensure that each assessment item aligns directly with these objectives, so students know what’s expected of them.
2. Consider Timelines and Workload:
Plan the assessment schedule to avoid overwhelming students with multiple assessments close together. You can use FLOWseries and FLOWcombine for assessment scheduling and checking progress. Also, consider the time required for students to complete each assessment accurately.
3. Use Varied Question Types:
Incorporate a mix of question types that assess different levels of cognitive skills, such as knowledge, understanding, application, analysis, and evaluation. This variety provides a comprehensive evaluation of students' learning. Moreover, using a breadth of assessment formats will also help to tackle the challenge of AI to academic integrity.
4. Avoid Ambiguity and Bias:
Ensure that assessment questions and instructions are clear, concise and free from any potential bias, as ambiguous questions can confuse students and negatively impact their performance. Here, you can use FLOWsentiment, which creates a report for an assessor against each participant they have marked providing data on how their feedback may be perceived, to assess and eradicate potential bias.
5. Engaging and Interactive Elements:
Integrate multimedia elements, interactive components and technology-enhanced items to make the assessment more engaging and aligned with digital learning environments. For instance, you could use the whitelisting feature in WISEflow to ask students to demonstrate their Excel or coding skills.
6. Support Authentic Assessment:
Design assessment tasks that reflect real-world scenarios and practical applications of knowledge, as this approach encourages critical thinking and problem-solving skills. At Brunel University, three-hour history exams were transformed into 24-hour assessments that better reflected what students would be asked to do in real life, and the feedback from students and faculty was unanimously positive.
7. Adaptive and Personalised Assessments:
If possible, consider using adaptive assessment techniques to adjust the difficulty level based on students' responses, providing personalised evaluation and a more accurate measure of their abilities.
8. Provide Rich Feedback
Take advantage of the platform’s ability to provide a range of feedback types, such as highlights, comments, audio clips and rubrics, as constructive feedback enhances learning and helps students identify areas for improvement.
9. Implement Timed Assessments Wisely:
If using timed assessments, ensure that the time allocated is sufficient for students to complete the tasks comfortably, including any uploads and submission time. Avoid overly strict time constraints that may lead to unnecessary stress and consider how you can develop a fair and inclusive extra-time policy.
10. Control for Cheating and Plagiarism:
Implement safeguards to prevent cheating and plagiarism, such as randomised question order, question pools and the use of plagiarism detection tools. This could mean using similarity services built into the platform as well as the lockdown browser.
11. Formative Assessment Opportunities:
Integrate formative assessments throughout the course to provide ongoing feedback and help students gauge their progress. This could include structured MCQs, practice exercises and self-assessment tools. At Bucerius Law School, for instance, WISEflow is used in a flipped classroom approach and enables students to test their understanding of material on an ongoing basis.
12. Data Analysis and Insights:
Leverage the data generated from digital assessments to gain insights into student performance and make data-driven decisions to improve teaching and learning. At Brunel University, for example, data from WISEflow was used to identify students who needed more support and address inequalities as a result of digital poverty.
13. Continuous Improvement:
Regularly review and update digital assessments based on student feedback, learning outcomes and emerging educational technology trends.