How Do We Know if Students are Learning?

For the third week of the BlendKit2012 course, faculty are asked to focus on how they will know that students are learning. Or in other words, how will we know if the students are able to achieve the objectives of the class? Many different types of formal assessment methods are discussed and the following research based elements for written assignments are provided - in my opinion these elements make an excellent checklist for a variety of assessment types because in my experience instructors often forget at least one element. I have found that the better we can explain what we want from students, the better they do on the assessment.

O’Reilly and Kelly (2008) recommend eight elements to include in written assignment instructions distributed to students online:

1. Assignment title (exactly the same as title used in syllabus and other course documents)
2. Learning objective(s) to which the assignment relates
3. Assignment due date (if receiving electronic submissions, include time/time zone also)
4. Submission details (electronic submissions only? required file format? via email? via assignment upload?)
5. Scoring criteria/rubric
6. Level of group participation (individual assignments, group or team projects, and entire class projects).
7. Mechanical details (number of words/pages, preferred style guide for citations, number/type of citations, etc.)
8. Any supporting resources necessary for assignment completion

Lastly, on the topic of formal assessment, buried deep inside some of the materials and resources provided this week, I came across a real gem for developing quiz questions http://www.caacentre.ac.uk/dldocs/otghdout.pdf