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Engage, Increase and Switch: Revaluate assessment techniques for online and blended assessments 

written by JJ Cloutier

content review Dec 2024

Three techniques for you, as instructors, to engage in, increase use of and switch away from as it relates to online and blended assessments. It is a rework of Contact North’s creative common piece Assessment of Student Learning – Three Things to Stop, Improve and Start! We have focused on applying a trauma-informed approach to writing this content and incorporating Manitoba perspectives and values into our version, including adding trauma-informed and decolonized pedagogical perspectives and MB Hub partner tools.   

On this page:

Engage 

  • Engage in seeing assessments as what a student knows and how they develop as a whole person including soft skills and, emotional, intellectual, physical and spiritual development (Restoule, 2019), such as: 
    • Critical thinking, teamwork, problem finding, communication and adaptability. 
    • Student empowerment, self-reflective behaviour and building a shared responsibility for the world (Eizadirad, 2019). 
    • Through relationship building, internally motivate students to care about themselves and their communities (Eizadirad, 2019). 
  • Engage in the feedback process and student growth more than the grade. Course and assessment design incorporating co-assessment or learning portfolios are examples of growth-focused approaches. 
    • Co-assessment combines student self-assessment and instructor assessment to provide reciprocal feedback. A basic version that can be achieved in online courses involves students self-assessing their assignment using a grading rubric. Then, you provide feedback on both the assignment and the student’s self-assessment.  
    • Learning portfolio or ePortfolios “have the unique advantage of capturing students’ academic and creative-reflective journeys and their progress and growth over time” (Dave & Mitchell, 2024). They help students construct knowledge, make their learning visible, and give students choices (agency) which support a more decolonized and trauma-informed approach to learning and encourage academic integrity. 
  • Engage in using peer-to-peer feedback for your formative assessments.  
    • Students recognize what they know and don’t know from assessing the work of peers and secure learning gains.  
    • Students often provide tougher feedback to each other than you might typically provide.  
    • MB Hub partners provide digital tools to enable and support peer-to-peer feedback (e.g., Kritik Peer Assessment platform, Peerceptiv and Moodle’s integrated peer assessment tool) for your online and multi-modal classes. 
    • The peer-to-peer feedback process can improve your assessment rubrics. When students ask questions about your rubric, it helps you refine and clarify your rubric. 

Supporting resources for engage 

Increase 

  • Increase project-based and collaborative assignments.  
    • Assess students on what they produce and how they work together to create and deliver it.  
    • Our future requires more teamwork, peer engagement and collaborative activity.  
  • Increase authentic, experiential learning as well as place-based and activity-based assignments. 
    • Ask students to demonstrate, present, perform, evaluate, blog, keep a journal or undertake a field-designed task.  
    • Assessments should allow students to share the knowledge they have gained or built in a topic in a real-world situation (Messier, 2022).   
  • Increase your use of online adaptive assessment tools (adaptive branching) in learning management systems if available at your institution.  
    • Adaptive assessments help students progress at their own pace towards the learning outcomes in courses.  
    • A great active learning addition for asynchronous and large classroom courses.  
    • Some of these tools are easier to use than others, but the big idea is that each student will progress at different rates and through different routes.  

Supporting resources for increase 

Switch 

  • Switch from worrying about cheating to engaging your learners.  
    • Traditional assessment practices encourage and enable cheating.  
    • Changing the assessment design reduces the need for more expensive surveillance systems.  
    • When we design assessments differently, students are less likely to cheat.  
  • Switch from thinking that your learners’ grades must be on a bell curve (normal distribution).  
    • View your students as individuals, not data points.  
    • Grading to a bell curve can create “grade deflation” and demotivate students (Murad, Jefri and Le Ha, 2021).  
  • Switch from using multiple-choice exams. Problems with multiple-choice exams include: 
    • Normative distribution is an outdated distribution model of performance. Research shows the power law or long-tail distribution is a better fit (O’Boyle and Aguinis, 2012). 
    • Unreliable because students easily find ways to cheat.  
    • Not inclusive; they give some learners an advantage over others. 
    • Generally ineffective at enabling sustained learning or the application of learning.  

Supporting resources for switch 

References 

Dave, K., & Mitchell, K. (2024). Enhancing Flexible Assessment Through ePortfolios: A Scholarly Examination. Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice. https://doi.org/10.53761/wearsf41 

Eizadirad, A. (2019). Decolonizing Educational Assessment: Ontario Elementary Students and the EQAO. Palgrave Macmillan Cham https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27462-7 

Messier, N. (2022). Authentic Assessments. Center for the Advancement of Teaching Excellence at the University of Illinois Chicago. Retrieved November 27, 2024, from https://teaching.uic.edu/resources/teaching-guides/assessment-grading-practices/authentic-assessments/  

Murad, Jefri and Le Ha, (2021, October 23). Why the Bell Curve system for giving grades needs reform. University World News. Retrieved November 27, 2024, from https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20211019082700738 

O’Boyle, E., Jr., & Aguinis, H. (2012). The Best and the Rest: Revisiting the Norm of Normality of Individual Performance. Personnel Psychology, 65(1), 79-119. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2011.01239.x 

Restoule, JP. (2018). Where Indigenous Knowledge Lives: Bringing Indigenous Perspectives to Online Learning Environments. In: McKinley, E., Smith, L. (eds) Handbook of Indigenous Education. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-1839-8_62-1 

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