1. Using Assessment as a Tool to Improve Learning and Teaching in Your Course
Leah Parsons Simpson, Ed.D.
Director of Assessment and Curriculum Development, University of Kentucky College of Pharmacy

2. Common Misconceptions about Assessment
I’ve heard ^
Common Misconceptions about Assessment
Assessment is an add-on to my work.
Origin of standardized tests:
Assessment of learning for general and graduate education:
Rise of test providers: 1948 – 78
External accountability: 1979-present Shavelson, R. J., Schneider, C. G., & Shulman, L. S. (2007). A brief history of student learning assessment: How we got where we are and a proposal for where to go next. Association of American Colleges and Universities.
Assessment is not new. Unless you’ve been working at this faculty gig for more than 100 years, it’s not an add-on to your work. It’s been a part of higher education in American for a long time now.
But, even before the first standardized test was given, instructors assessed student work. Outside of assessment, how would any teacher know when a student was ready to move on? How would they know when someone was ready to start their own profession. Think about apprenticeships way back in the day… there was no set time period. Going in, the apprentice and the skilled person might agree on the expected amount of time necessary to get all the skills and knowledge to adequately perform the job, but that was just a best guess. In reality, it would depend on the apprentice’s aptitude for the skill being studied, the quality and quantity of experiences the person had, etc. And ultimately, the apprentice would have to perform a series of tasks and get evaluated on those before passing to the next stage of their career.
What probably is new about assessment is the requirement to report, but if you are doing the things you need to do in the course and in your program – stuff you’ve probably always done – then the reporting should not be difficult. And if it is difficult, then there are ways to alleviate that.

3. Common Misconceptions about Assessment
I’ve heard ^
Common Misconceptions about Assessment
Assessment is something I do once a year for accreditation.
Tool to improve student learning, teaching, courses, and program efficiency
The problem with assessment is that when folks like myself – I’m an assessment director, you know the one that pushes the go-button for accreditation reports – the problem, as I was saying, is that when folks like me talk about assessment, we often start the conversation by mentioning accreditation. Here’s the problem, accreditors tell us what we have to do. And if there’s one thing I know about people, it’s that we don’t like to be told what to do. Raise your hand if you like to be told what to do.
Okay, so maybe a few folks don’t mind it. But in general, most of us want to do the things we find valuable and important. Doing stuff just because and accreditor tells us to is annoying, right? I’m here to tell you that we should be doing assessment not because accrediting bodies tell us it’s required, we should be doing it because assessment helps us to be better teachers and it helps our students be better learners.

4. Common Misconceptions about Assessment
I’ve heard ^
Common Misconceptions about Assessment
Assessment is separate from what I do in the classroom
How do you help students know what they need to do in order to improve?
How do you evaluate which changes to make in your content or teaching?
As I said, assessment is to benefit learning and teaching. This is where we, the assessment folks, should spend more of our energies. We need to help faculty understand that assessment is directly connected to teaching and learning. These three things go hand in hand. One helps inform the other. Neither should act independently of one another.
There’s been some conversation recently about the state of assessment in America. The national dialogue has focused on the intention of assessment as compared to the intention of improvement. Doug Roscoe calls this the Assessment Paradigm and the Improvement Paradigm. This is something I’ve been thinking about and talking about to colleagues for a long time, so I was thrilled when I read Roscoe’s take on it.

5. The improvement paradigm is “about changing what happens in the classroom – what students actually experience as they progress through their courses – so that learning is deeper and more consequential.
D. Roscoe, 2017
One of the things I love about the improvement paradigm is that it marries teaching and learning with assessment, actually it puts teaching and learning on the pedestal. I don’t know how things are on this campus, but one thing I’ve discovered as I talk to assessment folks around the nation is that not all campuses do a great job connecting teaching and learning with assessment. My own university isn’t great at this.
To me this is an educational tragedy. If we really want to improve learning and programs, then we have to change what happens in the classrooms, right? That’s where learning begins for our students. Which means we need to help faculty understand that pedagogy and student activity in and out of the classroom matters. I am of the opinion that if we use assessment in the classroom as our guide, we can dramatically improve student learning, motivation, and success.
That’s where I want to focus my conversation – assessment in the classroom, specifically motivating, change-inducing assessment in the classroom.

6. What if I told you ??????? Assessment in the classroom can…
Improve learning in your courses
Motivate your students
Inform your pedagogy and content decisions
Feed the program assessment
???????

7. The Power of Autonomy
Self-Determination Theory (SDT) states that all humans have three basic psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness (Deci & Ryan, 1985, 1994, 2000)
Autonomy in learning has been linked to greater student satisfaction, persistence, and deeper learning (Seiver & Troja, 2014; Wielenga-Meijer, Taris, Wigboldus & Kompier, 2012)
Perception of autonomy-support leads to greater school achievement (Mih & Mih, 2013)
Feedback can be autonomy-supportive when it Feeds Up, Feeds Back, and Feeds Forward (Hattie & Timperley, 2007)
Before we can understand how assessment might be used to motivate students, we need to have a bit of an understanding about motivation, in general. To do that, I want to use Self-Determination Theory as the framework.
Two psychologist, Deci & Ryan, set out to better understand why some people are more intrinsically motivated than others. What they found is that that all humans have three basic psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. When these three things are combined in the right circumstance, what you get is a really motivated individual.
As educators, we care about this, because motivated students learn more and deeper, they don’t quit, they have a good time, they think of us and our program fondly when they leave, they are more competent and achieve more. To help increase this motivation, we can support student autonomy by giving quality feedback.

8. The Power of Feedback
Feedback has an average effect size of 0.79 on learning (Hattie, 1999)
Feedback with higher effect sizes contain a “informational component”
Powerful feedback has three components (Hattie & Timperley, 2007)
Feed Up: Make the goals of the course/assignment apparent
Feed Back: Explain the student’s current progress
Feed Forward: Help students understand what they need to do to get better
Before we give feedback, what do we have to do? We have to assess the students performance. Feedback doesn’t happen in a vacuum, it’s the result of an assessment, whether formal or informal. But when we give a student feedback what we are really saying is, “I’ve made a judgement…” and then you let students know where they land on the continuum of whatever is being assessed, right?

9. Assessment in the Classroom
Formative Assessment
Summative Assessment
Evaluate student learning at the conclusion of a course/unit.
The purpose is to MEASURE students’ performance against a set of criteria or standards.
Does require grading.
Monitor student learning and give feedback for improvement BEFORE the big exam (project, paper, etc.).
The purpose is to IMPROVE student learning.
Does not require grading.
Since we know that feedback is a product of assessment, let’s talk about in-class assessment.
There are two types: formative and summative.
In my experience, faculty tend to focus more on the summative assessment and less on the formative assessment. We think about the big exams, papers, projects – all those things that we use to help us determine if a student qualifies to move on in the program. But I want to suggest that, for the sake of learning – our own and our students’ – we should focus more on the formative assessment.
Remember when I said that assessment can increase student motivation? Well that is fully in the formative assessment camp. Formative assessment is the one that does that.
Remember when I said that classroom assessment, if properly planned, can feed the program assessment process? Well that’s the summative stuff.
There are some occasions when an assignment is both summative and formative. For instance, in my doctoral program, we actually wrote a draft of chapter two for our dissertation in a research course. That was a final assignment for the course. Summative in the course, but of course, formative in the sense that I took that feedback very seriously when I inserted the chapter into my dissertation. But, generally, formative and summative assessment don’t mix.
Today, what I want to talk about is Formative Assessment.

10. Why Formative? Formative provides teaching opportunities.
Formative provides opportunities for meaningful feedback
Formative assessments help you know what you need to do to get students up to speed in time for the big assessment.
Think about the individual student
Think about the entire class
I think that often when faculty think about classroom assessment they think about the big things. The summative things. It’s easy to plan for the final activities that help us, as the educators, know if students have really achieved the goals and outcomes of the course, right? When we plan for a course, it’s pretty easy to rattle off the big activity that will let us know if students “get it.” The paper, the final exam, the big presentation or performance. Those are easy to think about. What we don’t think about as much, however, is the formative assessments. The starter assessments that inform the learning process.
Students learn from formative assessment, not summative. It’s the quizzes, pre-tests, homeworks, etc. that get students thinking. IF they mess up these things, they will find ways to remediate for the big exam. By the time they fail the big exam, it’s too late. They push that behind them and move on.
We’ll talk more about what “meaningful feedback” is in a bit, but suffice it to say that students are more motivated to learn and change before the big evaluation (e.g., test, paper, etc.) than they are after it.
This can be done in two ways.
Individual student assessment – a student comes to you and wants to know what they can do to perform better. Looking over assessment feedback, scores, all that can help you give them feedback on how to improve
Aggregate student assessment – what are the things that most/all students missed? How can you get them up to speed? If everyone missed it then it’s something you did, or perhaps, didn’t do in the class. This is an area that you need to fix, not just this time, but the next time you teach the course.

11. What do These Men Have in Common?
Coaches. Good ole’ Pete didn’t last long in the coaching ranks, but he is still a god in Cincinnati and I felt compelled to put him in the mix. It broke my heart to put Bellachick up there, but let’s be honest, no matter how you feel about him, it doesn’t change the fact that he is a good coach. He takes talent that no one else sees and turns it into a championship. There were THREE ex-Cleveland Browns players on the Patriots Super Bowl roster last year.

12. Cleveland, you guys!

13. Coaches… But seriously, back to the topic at hand.
No matter what the sport, all coaches (even Hue in Cleveland) expect their teams to practice. For football, it’s currently training camp season. The NFL has moved to a system where most teams host a mini-camp in June, that last about a week, sometimes two. Then training camp run for about a month, starting at the end of July. It’s during these practice sessions, and sometimes scrimmages, that the coaches conduct their primary assessments. They analyze and evaluate player abilities and aptitudes. They pull folks aside and tell them what they need to work on. They watch film and have the players watch film so that the players can self-assess.
It’s during these practices that the coaches really impact player performance.
My husband played college baseball and pitched in the minor league for a few years. He’s a fire marshal now, but he also coaches baseball on the side: high school pitching coach and travel team coach. As a travel coach he’s probably one of the most laid back coaches you will ever see on the field. He never yells, fusses or gets upset. During practice, though, it’s a different story. He doesn’t yell or get too upset, but his attitude is a bit different during practice than it is during a game. I asked him once why he approaches coaching so differently than most, and he said it’s because kids don’t learn as much during a game. The time to correct and inform is during practices. That’s when you get kids to change the way they do things.
That is formative assessment.

14. What Does Formative Assessment Look Like?
Quizzes
Minute papers
Think-pair-share
Diagram or draw a concept/activity
Answer a problem in a group
PRACTICE!
Formative assessment is simply PRACTICE for your students. It’s the time you have to correct their issues, move them further toward proficiency. It’s when you motivate them to get better.
The key to formative assessment is that it is practice for the student. Athletic teams are great at giving lots of formative assessments. If you equate a class to a team sport, you might equate the class session to the practice, and the final assessment to the game. A coach would never just go right into a game, would they? NO, they hold lots and lots of practices first. Why? So students can get experience. So the coach can judge abilities first and correct any problems. So the team can learn to be cohesive and work together. That’s what formative feedback does for the students. It gives them the practice they need.
If you’re not sure of what formative assessment can be, CATs by Angelo and Cross are a good place to start, but formative assessment can be anything.
The key to formative assessment is that it needs to connect to the summative assessment. So when you think about the formative feedback you need in your course, think first about the primary assessment (summative) and then think about the ways the students should practice for that.
For example, in Pharmacy school student must learn to give immunizations. They start with instruction and then they move to practice. They first work in groups with arm pads – fake arms to practice on. When they feel ready, they give injections to their peers. 2 practice (intramuscular and subcutaneous) and then a third one that is the choice of the observer.

15. So what’s the problem with feedback. It’s time consuming
So what’s the problem with feedback? It’s time consuming! If you are like me, it’s not easy meeting the minimum requirements of your job. To add complex and time-consuming feedback into the mix makes it even harder.
How can you fix that? ORGANIZATION! If you take some time to plan and organize your attack, feedback can get easier.
The key to feedback is that it has to be usable for the student. It needs to be presented in a way that students can make heads or tails out of how to use it. Which means that grades are not enough. Unless a student is very proficient and very good at connecting information to the bigger picture (and I’m here to tell you they are not), then giving back test or quiz answers is not enough. Feedback should feed back to the goals of the assignment or the course.

17. Organized Feedback Can Look Like This
This and the next few examples I’m going to show all come out of my college. This feedback uses a technology called ExamSoft. I won’t get into the details of the system, but suffice it to say, that it tracks the items on a quiz or exam and allows faculty to align those items to outcomes, goals, or content. This example shows items that are aligned specifically to content (disease states) and outcomes. More importantly, the student can track their performance by looking at the color-coded icons. Green = good, Yellow = caution, Red = You absolutely need to work on this.
So a student could look at this report and see that before her exam she needs to absolutely focus on some very specific areas. The stuff in green can probably be glossed over because it seems as if she knows that, right?

18. Or This
Your LMS system may be able to track outcomes/competencies/goals for you. This is a screen shot of how outcomes can and are being tracked in Canvas, our LMS system. D2L has a system, but it’s an add-on and I’m not sure if that’s something your college has invested in. If not, no worries. It can be done in other ways.

19. Or This
Performance events may require tracking via rubrics and checklists. Here’s an example of one that I graded for a multicultural course offered in the college. Interestingly enough, this is a summative assessment from the first year the faculty had this assignment. Students, over all, did not do well. (I’m showing a nicer one). After talking with the faculty and the students, it was clear to me that students didn’t really pay attention to the rubric. Why? Because they never had to before. Most faculty in the college don’t use them and if they do, the students are so used to doing well that they just winged it. Turns out, this faculty really wanted them to get something from it and expected they deliver at a high level. So after talking about it, we decided that the best course of action was to turn the final writing project into a series of writing assignments, each evaluated with a rubric. The first round went pretty much as the one shown here did. Students did not perform as they should have. By round two, quality improved. By round three, it was vastly improved. When the speaking project came due, the students blew it out of the water. Why? Because they had been taught how to use feedback for improvement. And because they had been made aware of the expectations.

20. Don’t Forget about Checklists!
Checklists allow you to mark yes/no for items, content, or skills that you observe in the class performance or product
Create a system to indicate student’s strengths and weaknesses (e.g. checks for strengths, Xs for weaknesses)
Week 1
Week 2
First sentence grabs my attention
Problem/conflict is interesting
Character is introduced in first 100 words
Characters are realistic & consistent
Characters are revealed through dialogue, action, and thoughts
Descriptions are interesting & relevant to the story
Checklists can be anything you want them to be. You can add broad items or narrow items. I used these types of checklists when I taught middle school language arts. I got so tired of reviewing writing and leaving the same feedback over and over:
A lot is two words.
Limit the use of contractions in formal writing.
I can’t read your handwriting!
Your arguments aren’t logical or orderly
You make claims that you don’t substantiate
Cite your sources!
By the second semester, I could really see a big difference in student performance and the quality of first drafts.
Content adapted from Grading a Short Story: A Checklist. (2010) Escherdax.wordpress.com

21. How do Students Use Formative Feedback?
This is actually from three years ago, when I was just starting to get faculty to give formative feedback to students.

22. If we want to improve student learning and the quality of our programs, then we must assess. Just like summative assessment data is feedback we use to make program decisions & course decisions, formative assessment data is feedback our students use to make improvements in their own learning. And improvement, though it should take place everywhere, at its crux is a student-centered endeavor. Right? Give students the feedback they crave by providing them with data from their formative assessments.