Assessment Process

The Assessment Loop

The Process

Assessment can be summed up as the process of answering four question sets:

1. What do you want students to know? What do you want students to be able to do?
2. How will you find out whether they know what you want them to know? How will you find out whether they have the skills you intend them to have?
3. How well do they know what you want them to know? To what extent do they have the skills you intend them to have?
4. Now that you have the answers to the above questions, what actions should you take to improve student learning even further?

Here's a more complete way of describing the assessment process:

1. What student learning (knowledge and skills) do we want to assess?
2. What do we hope to find out?
3. What specific information is needed?
4. What is the best assessment method/demonstration of learning? How will we gather the information we need?
5. How will we make sense of our findings?
6. How will we make sure that we are comparing different cases appropriately? (e.g., through the use of rubrics)
7. How can/should our findings be used to bring about improved student learning?

Approaches

There are five ways to approach assessment, each of which addresses a different question. These are presented below in increasing order of assessment difficulty:

1. What do students know and what can they do compared to external absolute standards or pre-established criteria for such knowledge and skills? This is relatively easy to assess if the standards or criteria are available and clear.
   
   
2. How much did students learn over the course of the class or program? This can be assessed using demonstrations of knowledge/skills at the beginning and end of the course or program.
   
   
3. How much is student learning improving or failing to improve over time? While similar to the above approach, the approach is broader and may incorporate multiple areas of learning.
   
   
4. How much are students learning compared to the amount they are capable of learning? This type of assessment is less common since it can be hard to determine what students are capable of learning.
   
   
5. How is student learning going at Colorado College compared to our peer institutions? Obtaining benchmarking information can be politically and logistically difficult, so this type of assessment is not very common.