MBECTEAlternative Assessments

What is Assessment?

Effective assessment is a lot broader than just assigning quizzes and essays at the end of a unit. Assessment is how we ensure our learners exit our classrooms with the knowledge and skills we intended to share with them. There are 3 main forms of assessment:

Diagnostic: Happens before learners encounter the learning content to gauge prior knowledge.
Formative: Happens after learners have been exposed to the learning content to practice with their new knowledge.
Summative: Happens after learners have taken a formative assessment to gauge final performance.

Traditional assessment tools like multiple choice tests might be easy to administer and grade, but often do not provide a thorough view of student understanding and only measure lower levels of Bloom's Taxonomy.

Alternative assessments (also known as authentic or performance assessments) like project-based opportunities provide learners with more real-world knowledge, engage higher levels of Bloom's Taxonomy, and relay more information about the student's understanding and proficiency with the material.

There are benefits and drawbacks to all types of assessments– it's important that you choose the right tool to measure performance accurately and fairly.

Strengths-Based Assessment

Each student has their own strengths, weaknesses, and experience that make them who they are. One reason that alternative assessments can be a great option to incorporate into your course is that they provide learners with multiple means of expressing their understanding of the course content.

Providing opportunities to show proficiency that do not rely on a single skill (e.g. recall on a multiple choice exam), but rather leverage multiple skill areas at once (e.g. a project requiring close reading, creative expression, persuasive writing, etc.) allows learners to showcase their strengths, push their skills in several areas, and become more engaged and invested in their learning.

In Hacking Deficit Thinking, Dr. Byron McClure and Kelsie Reed share the S.P.O.T. method for strength-based teaching:

Hacking Deficit Thinking

S.P.O.T.

Strength Observation
- Observe your students' strengths. Ask yourself:
  - Does this student work better independently or with others? How do they collaborate?
  - How does this student focus on tasks? When are they most engaged?
  - What appears challenging for them? What appears simple?
  - What patterns appear?
Progress Over Perfection
- Seek out strength-building opportunities with your students.
- Utilize diagnostic and formative assessment results to better gauge student performance levels. With this information, incorporate their growth over time into your summative assessment feedback.
Opportunity to Shine
- Provide learners with a variety of assessment activities that allow them to showcase what they're good at.
- Allow students to practice the skills they haven't mastered yet without penalties and provide active feedback.
Teach, Try, & Tap Into Strengths
- Guide your students to find their personal strengths and embrace them.
- Encourage learners to expand their strengths and work with them in new ways.
- Show students how to collaborate with others whose strengths differ from their own.

Placing the focus on intentionally building strengths over pushing through weaknesses is a great way to build an inclusive, growth-oriented classroom culture.

Want to Learn More?

Read a quick excerpt from Hacking Deficit Thinking by Byron McClure and Kelsie Reed from KQED.
Check out the full book, Hacking Deficit Thinking, available from X10 Publications.
Learn more about building a growth mindset.

Transparent Assignments

The first step to improving your assignments and assessments in your course is transparent communication. For many students, it can be difficult to fully comprehend how to form a quality response when there isn't a clear cut pathway to success.

The University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) created the Transparency In Learning and Teaching project (TILT Higher Ed) "to advance equitable teaching and learning practices that reduce systemic inequities in higher education". The TILT assignment framework consists of 3 parts:

Purpose: Why are students completing this assignment? What objectives should they expect to learn by doing this?
Task: What steps do learners need to complete to finish this assignment?
Criteria: How are you measuring whether or not learners achieved the objectives for this assignment? How are you grading this?

TILT Higher Ed has created several excellent resources for educators that are simple to use and will help you to update your assignments and assessments to be more transparent:

Transparent Assignment Template
Checklist for Designing Transparent Assignments
Transparent Equitable Learning Framework for Students

Want to Learn More?

Find more examples and resources from TILT Higher Ed.
Learn about best practices when creating grading rubrics from Brown University.
Discover how to use Canvas rubrics to make grading a breeze.

Project-Based Learning (PBL)

Project-based learning (PBL) is an excellent way to use UDL principles in the classroom and incorporate life skill-building opportunities into every element of your course experience. Check out how students at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands helped their community.

"The knowledge development is much deeper and more sophisticated than if they were just listening to a lecture or reading a book."

– Julie Schell, Executive Director of Learning Design at UT Austin

There are a wide array of PBL opportunities in the classroom– projects can be excellent diagnostic, formative, and summative assessments. There are a few essential principles to keep in mind when creating a project for your course:

The Gold Standard project design elements from PBLWorks. See the full details at https://www.pblworks.org/what-is-pbl/gold-standard-project-design

The Gold Standard teaching practices from PBLWorks. See the full description at https://www.pblworks.org/what-is-pbl/gold-standard-teaching-practices

By allowing learners to deeply engage with complex problems, use their knowledge in context, and design solutions with tangible impacts, we create opportunities to see how they may choose to use their new knowledge in the future.

Want to Learn More?

Consider This...

It can be a challenge to make the switch from traditional assessment methods, especially for those teaching large enrollment classes.

Quizzes and papers might seem like the simplest way to gauge your students, but alternative assessment strategies can actually be even simpler– they're more AI-proof and make grading a lot less of a chore, too! Check out some alternative ideas below.

Find all kinds of other ways to switch up your assessment strategies from Indiana University, too!

Instead of Quizzes, try...

Instead of Papers, Try...