Tip Sheets: Assessment and Feedback
A practical guide to designing clear, purposeful, and student-centered assignments that align with your course goals.
Explore assignment sequences that progressively develop students’ skills and understanding, creating a more cohesive course experience.
Use Bloom’s Taxonomy as a framework to articulate learning outcomes and design assessments and activities based on three domains (cognitive, affective, psychomotor).
Translate Bloom’s Taxonomy into practical classroom strategies with examples of learning activities and assessments aligned to each level of the hierarchy.
Gather meaningful midterm feedback to enhance teaching effectiveness, address student needs, and improve the learning experience in real time.
Streamline grading and feedback with Crowdmark, a collaborative online assessment platform that supports efficient, flexible evaluation of student work.
General strategies for creating effective multiple-choice questions, including tips for writing clear stems and plausible distractors.
Support students in making the most of your feedback with strategies that build feedback literacy, promote reflection, and encourage active engagement in the learning process.
Tips for designing effective exams, including an overview of common question types, their strengths and limitations, and how to align assessments with learning outcomes.
Help students prepare for exams with a collaborative review activity that reinforces key concepts, encourages peer learning, and builds confidence through active engagement.
Exam wrappers are activities that “wrap around” an exam to enhance students' meta-cognition and their reflection on their assessments.
Grade efficiently and fairly with strategies that balance timeliness and consistency, and reduce grading bias.
Choose the right type of small group for your learning goals by exploring various formats that support collaboration, engagement, and effective classroom dynamics.
As Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) reshapes higher education, instructors must rethink their assessment approaches. This teaching tip presents a modified AI Assessment Scale (AIAS) as a framework for integrating GenAI into assessment design.
Design effective online assignments by aligning them with course outcomes, leveraging digital tools, and promoting student engagement through clear expectations and meaningful feedback.
Design assessments that prioritize student learning by aligning with course outcomes, offering meaningful feedback, and encouraging reflection, growth, and active engagement.
Maximize the impact of learning activities and assignments by aligning them with course outcomes, promoting active engagement, and providing opportunities for meaningful feedback and reflection.
Foster research skills and critical thinking by designing library-based assignments that encourage exploration of scholarly resources, scaffold the research process, and align with students’ academic levels and course goals.
Low-stakes writing tasks support student learning by encouraging idea development, reinforcing course concepts, and providing a safe space for practice without the pressure of formal graded assessment.
Ensure a smooth transition to online exams by aligning exam formats with learning outcomes, leveraging appropriate technologies and preparing students through clear communication and practice opportunities.
Design effective take-home exams by emphasizing higher-order thinking, setting clear expectations, and promoting academic integrity through smart question design and open communication.
Support student success by creating assignments that match their learning level, offer the right mix of challenge and skill-building, and scaffold their critical thinking and disciplinary expertise.
Assess group work effectively by providing clear grading expectations, using both individual and group evaluations, and building accountability and reflection through self and peer review.
Enhance collaboration and critical engagement by using online tools that support co-creation and annotation, which enables students to interact with content, share insights, and build knowledge collectively in real time.
Deepen conceptual understanding and promote active learning by using peer instruction to engage students in discussion, reveal misconceptions, and reinforce key ideas through immediate feedback.
Boost student engagement and real-time understanding by using personal response systems to pose questions, gather instant feedback, and stimulate peer discussion during class sessions.
Enhance the effectiveness of test and exams by aligning questions with learning outcomes, balancing question types and difficulty, and providing clear instructions.
Explore how to foster critical thinking in our learners by designing activities that challenge assumptions, encourage analysis and synthesis, and incorporate assessment strategies that make students’ reasoning visible and open to feedback.
Through timely, specific, and constructive feedback, instructors can enhance student learning. This tip provides guidance on how to provide feedback as well as supports to guide students to seek, interpret, and apply feedback to improve their performance and understanding.
This tip explores how to respond efficiently to student writing assessments by setting clear expectations, using focused feedback strategies, and balancing formative and summative comments to support learning while managing your workload.
method of assessing concept maps, proposed by Novak and Gowin, is based on the components and structure of the map
Rubrics are a helpful tool to increase clarity and consistency in the grading process. This tip outlines how to articulate expectations, and provide targeted feedback to support student learning and self-assessment.
Promote fair and consistent assessment by developing clear rubrics, calibrating expectations among assessors, and fostering open communication to ensure reliability and transparency in grading.
Diversify student learning and evaluation by incorporating a range of assignment types that align with learning outcomes, support skill development, and offer multiple ways to demonstrate understanding.
Peer review, also called peer editing, peer feedback, and formative peer assessment, allows students to provide and receive feedback on an assignment before submitting it to the instructor
Turnitin is a text-matching tool for encouraging academic integrity
As learning tools, writing exercises are valuable because they help students think critically about course material while encouraging them to grasp, organize, and integrate prior knowledge with new concepts.