Focus on Pedagogy:

Effective Assessment Practices

SUNY Learning Network
Instructional Design Team
Good Assessment Practices
(after Arthur Chickering & Zelda Gamson 1989)

1. Maximize student/faculty contact

2. Develop student cooperation
3. Use active learning techniques
4. Give feedback promptly
5. Emphasize time on task
6. Communicate high expectations
7. Respect learners’ diversity
 Ways to Improve
Teaching and Learning
1. Implement research-based “best practices”

2. Employ an assessment-informed model of teaching focused

on measurable student learning outcomes.
• Define learning outcomes (desired by teachers and/or learners) well in
advance.
• Assess progress toward outcomes, by and for both teacher and
learner, continually during learning.
• Evaluate attainment of outcomes rigorously as each learning
opportunity concludes.
Moment-by-moment, meeting-by-meeting, course-by-course,
semester-by-semester.
 Summary of Differences
(from H. Stephen Straight)

Dimension of Difference Assessment Evaluation

Timing Formative Summative

Focus of Measurement Process-Oriented Product-Oriented

Relationship Between Teacher and

Student Reflective Prescriptive

Results Diagnostic Judgmental

Modifiability of Criteria and
Measures Flexible Fixed

Criterion- Norm-Referenced
Standards of Measurement
Referenced (Comparative)

Relation Between Activities of

Cooperative Competitive
Assessment/Evaluation
 Five Assessment Principles
(after Thomas Angelo & Patricia Cross 1993)
1. To improve their teaching, faculty must define learning
outcomes and measure their attainment.
2. To improve their learning, students must learn how to use
feedback to assess their own progress (= “self-assessment.”)
3. The best assessment derives from teachers’ questions about
their own teaching.
4. Systematic assessment can be an intellectually challenging
source of faculty satisfaction.
5. Assessment provides an impetus for active student
involvement, a proven “best practice.”