Category: assessment
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Assessments in Self-Paced Courses
Self-paced courses have transformed online education, giving students the freedom to progress through material on their own schedules. Unlike traditional instructor-led courses with fixed deadlines, self-paced learning allows students to engage with content when they feel ready, revisit challenging concepts, and complete coursework at a pace that fits their individual…
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Assessment Activities for Online Learning
Assessing student learning in an online environment involves more than just assigning grades—it’s about creating meaningful opportunities for students to demonstrate their understanding, reflect on their progress, and apply what they’ve learned in authentic ways. Effective assessment strategies strike a balance between formative and summative assessments, as well as traditional…
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Using Diagnostic Assessments
Understanding where your students are starting from is crucial. Each learner brings a unique set of experiences, skills, and challenges to your course. Diagnostic assessments are powerful tools for identifying these starting points, enabling you to tailor your teaching to better meet students’ needs. By using diagnostic assessments effectively, you…
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Identifying Prerequisite Learner Skills
As an instructor, you know that student success depends on more than just understanding the course material. Often, the ability to complete assessments and activities hinges on students’ possession of specific prerequisite skills—skills that your course may assume they already have but doesn’t explicitly teach. Identifying these skills, determining whether…
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Assessment Rationales
An assessment rationale is a justification for why a specific assessment has been included in a course or learning module. It explains how the assessment aligns with learning outcomes, the skills or knowledge it measures, and its role in supporting student learning. Providing a rationale ensures that assessments are intentional,…
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Fostering Creativity in Assessments
Creative assessments empower students to demonstrate their ability to synthesize knowledge, analyze complex information, and produce original work. These tasks often culminate in projects, portfolios, or proposals that reflect higher-order cognitive skills, creativity, and real-world problem-solving. However, success in this type of assessment depends on intentional, scaffolded learning activities that…
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Demonstrating Learning Through Performance
Performance assessments are a powerful way to evaluate how well students can apply their knowledge and skills in real-world or simulated professional contexts. Unlike traditional exams, performance-based assessments emphasize active demonstration—whether through presentations, debates, or problem-solving scenarios. However, success in a performance task doesn’t happen by chance. It requires carefully…
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Designing Effective Tests: Building Competencies for Success
When designing final exams, it’s easy to focus solely on the content of the assessment itself—what to include, how to structure it, and how to ensure fairness. However, the success of a final test depends as much on what happens during the course as on the test itself. To truly…
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Three Broad Categories of Final Evaluations: Test, Perform, Create
Final evaluations are a powerful way to measure student learning, providing insights into how well course objectives have been achieved. These assessments generally fall into three broad categories: Test, Perform, and Create. Each category aligns with specific course learning outcomes and allows educators to evaluate students’ mastery of essential skills…
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Final Evaluations
Final evaluations are a critical component of a well-designed course, providing a summative measure of how effectively students have achieved the course learning objectives. When thoughtfully crafted, these evaluations do more than test students’ knowledge—they validate their ability to apply, analyze, and synthesize what they’ve learned in meaningful ways. Aligning…
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