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Continuum College Instructor Resources

Learning Assessments

Assessments gauge your students’ understanding of course material and informs your teaching strategy. When designing assessments for your course, consider the following questions:

  1. During the course, what reliable evidence will inform you that your students are actually learning what you are intending them to learn?
  2. At the end of the course, what will provide you with reliable evidence that your students have obtained the knowledge, skills and abilities that you envisioned at the beginning of the course?

Learning Assessment Types

Assessments of student learning should be ongoing throughout your course, and different assessment types allow you to gauge student comprehension at different points in your lesson.

  • Diagnostic Assessment – Gauge student understanding of a subject prior to instruction.
  • Formative Assessment – Regularly gauge student understanding during instruction.
  • Summative Assessment – Measure student understanding at the end of instruction.
  • Criterion-Referenced Assessment – Measure student understanding against a specific goal or objective.
  • Authentic/Alternative Assessment – Authentic assessment (sometimes called alternative assessment), or assessment that focuses on demonstrating competencies as they take place in—or in an environment emulating—the real-world is both sound pedagogy and naturally protects assessment integrity. (For more information visit: UW Tacoma’s page on Digital Learning.)

Classroom Assessment Techniques

Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs) are activities that provide an instructor with immediate feedback on the overall class understanding. This feedback is critical to adjust your teaching and address areas of confusion.

Examples of CATs

  • Minute Paper – Give students a couple minutes to respond to 1 or 2 questions about the most significant things they learned from a specific class.
  • Muddiest Point – Give students a couple minutes to write their area of confusion (the “muddiest point”) in a specific class.
  • Directed Paraphrasing – Ask your students to explain an important concept from class in their own words.
  • Classroom Opinion Polls – Ask your students about their pre-existing opinions on course topics through very short questionnaires.

For more details on these Classroom Assessment Techniques and other CATs, visit the Eberly Center page on Using Classroom Assessment Techniques.

Rubrics

A rubric is a tool built from a set of criteria that can be used to both guide and evaluate student performance on an assignment. For more information visit Teaching@UW’s page on Rubrics.

Updated 03/01/2024