Assessment of Learning | Centre for Teaching Excellence

STAGE 2- DECIDE WAYS TO COLLECT EVIDENCE OF STUDENT LEARNING

At this stage, you determine:

The different assessment methods that demonstrate students’ achievement on the course learning objectives and their respective weightages/weightings towards the course grade
Whether you would assess students formatively (i.e. student is expected to learn from provided feedback) and/or summatively (i.e. grade awarded contributes to the overall grade at the end of the course)
The criteria (i.e. rubrics) you will use to ensure consistency in your evaluation of your students’ work (Click here for samples of grading templates contributed by SMU instructors)

CTE recommendations:

Plan assessments at the time the course outline is initially developed

Often, learning objectives are framed in advance of the assessment plan. Then, when the assessment plan is being developed and it becomes clear that the learning outcomes were framed poorly, instructors may end up with a situation of misalignment between the two. We recommend that you plan your assessments at the time the course outline is initially developed such that the learning objectives can be seen to be assessed and achievable within the timeframe of the course.

Select appropriate assessment methods to measure your course learning objectives

Some assessment methods are more suitable for assessing student learning at each thinking level of the Bloom’s revised Taxonomy. Table 2 provides a reference help you select the most appropriate assessment methods to measure your course learning objectives. In the instance where an assessment method can be used for assessing more than one thinking level, it will be mapped to the highest possible thinking level.

In judging whether students have met the learning outcomes, consider creating a rubric to make this transparent to students and to ensure consistency in your evaluation of students’ work. Our faculty members have given CTE permission to share their rubric templates with the SMU community. The grading templates can be accessed here. Please feel free to adapt the rubric templates according to your course. Click here for a resource guide on how to create quizzes in eLearn.

Put into practice: Completing your course outline document

Assessment Methods
List the assessment methods that you will be using to collect evidence student learning. For each assessment method, include details on its weightage contributions^ towards the course grade here. Give a short description on the purpose/format/how students will be graded for each assessment method. You may group the assessment methods according to:

Class participation
Group Assignments
Individual Assignments
Final Exam (up to 50% for all schools/centre, with the exception of School of Law, which is up to 60%)

An example is as follows:

Assessment method	Weightage	Description (Purpose/Format/How students will be assessed)
Online quizzes	10%	There will be 2 short quizzes for this course- one on Process Fundamentals and one on Inventory Management, to assess your understanding of factual information and concepts. Quizzes will be conducted via eLearn and conducted during Weeks 5 and 10. Each quiz consists of 20 MCQs, and each is 5% of the course grade.

^Note: For university core, business core and major-related required modules, a final exam is usually required. Please also note that the final exam should have no more than 50% of the total marks from MCQs. Check with your respective course coordinator/Dean’s Office on the guidelines for all other assessment method weightages applicable for your course (Source: SMU Teaching Handbook.)