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Developing Online Assessments of Student Learning

Introduction

As you’re getting accustomed to remote teaching and learning, you may be thinking now about how to assess student learning in this new format. Outlined below are various assessment tools that are available and some common ways that instructors adapt those tools to fit different teaching contexts. All of the tools in this post are available to faculty through Canvas, our course management system. For help using Canvas, reach out to the ITC Learning Design and Technology Team at  learning.design.tech@dartmouth.edu.

Because you are not seeing students regularly and getting to know them through face-to-face interactions, communication becomes one of the main challenges in remote teaching. Clearly communicating with students about expectations and requirements related to assessment is essential. Consider using the Canvas Announcements tool for whole-class communications, and one or more of the following tools for evaluating student work and providing useful feedback in a secure, FERPA-compliant environment. 

Online and face-to-face assessments are often quite different from one another. In a face-to-face classroom, an assessment might consist of a variety of question types and modes of demonstrating learning grouped together and given on a single day. For example, a language course might assess students on vocabulary, grammar, listening, writing, and reading skills all in one exam. A lab course might test students on theoretical and practical skills at the same time through an in-class activity. Another course might assess student recall, analysis, and writing skills in a written exam given during a single class period. However, when conducting online assessment, it is often necessary to tease out the various components of our assessments in order to match the type of assessment with the best tool for the job. Additional considerations include whether the assessment will be synchronous or asynchronous, group or individual, iterative or one-time, and how feedback will be communicated to students online. The answers to all of these questions will help to clarify which tools to use for the various parts of your overall assessment.

As you read this guide, think about which tools might best serve your purposes for each assessment strategy you plan to use. You might decide to rethink your assessment altogether in order to take full advantage of the affordances of remote teaching, or you might opt to cobble together two or three different tools to create one comprehensive assessment that is consistent with your goals for the course. As always, the ITC Learning Design and Technology team is here to help you determine what your assessment should look like and how to make it happen using the tools available.

Essays/Student Writing

If you are having your students write for their assessment, there are several ways you might consider having them turn in that writing.

Assignments

If you want students to submit their work privately to you for review, the Assignments tool in Canvas allows students to upload documents, record and submit videos, or add text, images, and/or links into a text box. The Assignments tool is one of the most versatile in Canvas, and comes with a grading tool (Speedgrader) that allows instructors to add comments directly onto student papers without leaving Canvas. The Assignments tool allows for multiple revisions (students may turn in their work multiple times) of the same essay, and accommodates students working in groups and submitting one assignment on behalf of the whole group. For more information on how to use the Assignments tool in Canvas, take a look at this short video: Assignments Overview (Instructors)

Quizzes

The Quizzes tool in Canvas can also be used for essays and other student writing assignments. While it is recommended to avoid setting time limits whenever possible so you do not add to students’ stress level and increase the propensity to cheat, iIf you want to see what your students produce during a fixed amount of time without time to prepare and revise, the quiz tool allows instructors to set a time limit and grade on a question-by-question basis. The question type called “Essay quiz question” will give your students a text box in which to type their essay. This question type can be used in combination with other quiz question types if you’d like to vary the kinds of tasks students encounter in a single assessment. An additional option includes the “file upload quiz question,” which enables students to upload a prepared piece of writing or other file while completing a quiz. The “multiple attempts” option in Canvas quizzes can also allow students to iterate on their writing over time. For more information on this, check out our guide on Using Canvas for Quizzes, Tests, and Exams.

Discussions

If you want students to be able to read each other’s writing and respond asynchronously to one another, Discussions is the place to do it. Discussions are well-suited for interactions related to written ideas and arguments, rather than more granular, in-line edits and comments. Discussions can be used to facilitate conversation among the whole class, or among students in smaller groups. Online discussions can be used for a variety of assessment tasks. Consider having students post reading responses to a discussion in preparation for class. Try a jigsaw activity or other reciprocal teaching approach to allow students to develop expertise on different topics or readings, then provide written summaries or explanations in the discussion for their peers. Facilitate peer review of student writing by setting up a discussion space for each group and providing clear instructions for how to post work and respond to each other’s writing. 

Exams and time-constrained, individual assessment

If you are considering how to translate your face-to-face exam into an online format, consider the following.

Quizzes

The Quizzes tool in Canvas is designed to make online testing possible. It includes a variety of settings to add restrictions to a test or quiz, and includes question types such as written response, multiple choice, True/False, and others. Correct answers and/or standard comments can be embedded directly into the quiz to allow for automatic grading, which provides immediate feedback to students, or you can set up quizzes for manual grading. For more information on this, check out our guide on Using Canvas for Quizzes, Tests, and Exams.

Video Conferencing through Zoom 

One-on-one or small group oral examinations can be administered using Zoom. This works particularly well for short, focused oral exams. To create a concrete record of the exam for your own review, you can use the recording function in Zoom.

Tips for online exams: 

  1. Best practices in online assessment often emphasize more synthesis questions that require students to produce original work and fewer recall questions that are easy to Google. Many faculty also lower the stakes of assessments online so they comprise a lower overall percentage of the final grade while ongoing, generative work comprises a higher percentage of the grade.
  2. Keep in mind that Dartmouth relies on the academic honor principle as a mechanism for ensuring ethical testing. That does not change when we move online. While there aren’t ways to prevent cheating completely, there are adjustments we can make to reduce the likelihood. Consider changing your exam to allow for collaboration, extended time, or use of notes and other resources. You might also use isomorphic questions and randomization to give each student a different (but equivalent) exam. Read more about these options in Giving Exams Online: Strategies and Tools by Dr. Cynthia Brame, Associate Director of the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching. For more on designing learning environments that help remove the motivation for academic dishonesty, see James Lang’s 2013 book, Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty, from Harvard University Press.
  3. Consider whether your exam is aligned with the learning outcomes you’ve determined for your course and the learning you are looking to see demonstrated by your students. The more aligned your assessment is, the more meaningful it will be for students and the more indicative it will be to you. 
  4. Keep in mind the various challenges students are facing during this time--including unreliable internet access and variable circumstances and learning environments. Consider offering students some flexibility in how they demonstrate their learning, and whether there may be more practical methods than exams to reveal what students know and can do.

Presentations and Performances

Pre-Recorded Presentations

Students have access to the same video and audio recording tools in Canvas, Panopto, and Zoom as faculty. They can create webcam presentations, screencasts, or digital stories using these tools. Many may also have access to a smart phone with video recording capability. Once they have a video presentation created, they can upload it as an assignment submission or attach it to a discussion.  

Live Performances with Interaction

Some performances require a live audience for participation. In these cases, use Zoom. With Zoom’s breakout room feature, you can break your class up into groups and multiple students can be giving performances at the same time to different audiences while the instructor is able to pop in and monitor each one. 

Self-Assessment

Surveys and Quizzes

Surveys and Quizzes are two options within the Canvas Quizzes tool, and both can be used for self-assessment. The primary differences between the two tools are that Surveys can be made anonymous and are not graded for right/wrong answers, while Quizzes can be (but do not have to be) connected to a graded item in Grades. Either of these two tools can be used to walk students through a series of questions designed to help them analyze and assess their own performance through multiple choice, likert scale, or free response questions, among other question types. 

Reflective Assignments/Portfolios

If you have a good set of prompts for a reflective assignment or self-assessment, the Assignments tool is a great place for students to upload a variety of file types including documents, videos, and images, just like they might to an online portfolio. The instructor can give feedback using Speedgrader. 

Peer Assessment

Many of the tools already discussed are great vehicles for peer assessment. When deciding how to organize your peer assessment, start with a clear rubric or other tool that will help students focus their feedback and learn from others’ work. Rubrics can be easily built in Canvas, and added to basic assignments, discussions, and quizzes.  

Some of the educational technology tools integrated with Canvas that can be effectively used to provide space for small groups of students to provide peer feedback include:

Assessment for Learning/Test-Enhanced Learning

For many faculty members, a move to remote teaching is an opportunity to review how and why we assess student work. You might consider adopting a model of assessment that emphasizes how students improve their performance over time, rather than weighting particular assessments so heavily that they become high-stakes, high-anxiety experiences. In a recent post, Thomas Tobin describes how these kinds of high stakes experiences increase the possibility that students will cheat or be overwhelmed with anxiety.

For useful background on the benefit of test-enhanced learning, check out the teaching guide Test-enhanced learning: Using retrieval practice to help students learn by Vanderbilt Center for Teaching Associate Director, Dr. Cynthia Brame

In Canvas, there are tools that can help you provide students with this kind of low-stakes assessment and practice activities:

Low-stakes or multiple-attempt quizzes

Quizzes in Canvas can be set up as high-stakes exams, but they can also be set up to foster mastery. Using question banks, instructors can set up multiple practice quizzes that give students different sets of questions each time.  Quizzes can also be set up so that students have multiple attempts and only the highest attempt is entered in the grade book.

Iterative written assignments

The Assignments tool in Canvas can easily be set up so students can upload an assignment only once under a higher-stakes assessment model. However, it is also possible to allow students multiple submissions so that they can read feedback, revise their submission, and resubmit for a higher grade. By using the Assignments tool in Canvas, all of a student’s submissions and all of the instructor’s feedback can be kept organized in one space.

Tips for Assessing Online and Keeping your Sanity

In case of any kind of emergency that may keep you or your students from campus, it’s important to remember that the tools you need to assess online work are already in place. For instructors developing online assessments in a hurry, remember to:

1) Manage your time by automating when possible. Online grading is notorious for taking much longer than you imagine. Take advantage of Rubrics to help you preload the criteria you are going to use to grades students. In addition, you may want to create your own “comment bank” in a notes document that you keep handy for cutting and pasting in common feedback that you have for students. When you need to give case-specific feedback, consider using the audio and video feedback tools if that will help you go a bit faster. Bonus: audio and video feedback can also feel much more personal and help strengthen your rapport with your students.

2) Use existing assessments. Your textbook may already have assessments built into their online platform. Your colleagues at Dartmouth or other institutions may have developed online tools that they are willing to share. Look at the resources you already use and the people doing similar work and see how you can make use of what is already here.

3) Maximize your return on investment. Consider which tools you already know well and how you might leverage your existing knowledge as well as which tools will give you the most useful data on student performance. If you typically give a certain kind of midterm exam under normal circumstances, but the tools required to do the same kind of assessment online are overly challenging to set up in the short time you have available to you, it may or may not be a good investment to go ahead with your existing exam. You might decide that switching from a discrete item exam to a reflective paper makes more sense. Or you might decide that moving from performance assessment to an online quiz is the better solution. Collecting data about whether students are making progress is the goal of assessment, and it can happen many ways. Online teaching allows us to make some decisions about which data collection methods we choose and why.

4) Get help. Connect with colleagues who are faced with similar challenges or similar kinds of courses to crowdsource solutions. If you have questions about any Canvas tools, make a quick appointment with our ITC Learning Design and Technology Team using our training link or reach out via email at learning.design.tech@dartmouth.edu.

Based on a resource provided by Stacey M. Johnson, Assistant Director for Educational Technology at the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching https://www.vanderbilt.edu/brightspace/2020/03/25/developing-online-assessments-of-student-learning-in-a-hurry-we-have-resources-for-you/

With content adapted from Options for Assessing Student Learning When Teaching Online by Derek Bruff, Director at the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/2020/03/options-for-assessing-student-learning-when-teaching-online/

Developing Online Assessments