Reasonable Approach to Improving Instructor-Developed

¶ … reasonable approach to improving instructor-developed assessments in the real world? How does access to technology affect the improvement of assessments? Instructor-developed assessments should review past lesson content and also encourage students to use the basic skills they have acquired as part of the learning process. Assessments should reinforce learning, provide feedback to instructors about what students have learned, but not simply be rote regurgitations of in-class material. The process of taking the assessments themselves should be learning exercises and stretch student's imaginations.

"When analyzing data, unfavorable results should be considered, as well as favorable results. Realizing a problem exists (that students are not achieving an outcome) is the first step in motivating faculty to consider changes. The most important result of assessment efforts is the discussion and introspection" (Chapter 5: Assessment of student learning, 2011, Beyond Crossroads). In assessments, even assessments constructed within the classroom, the instructor is being assessed just as much as the student.

There has been a growing movement to 'think outside of the box' and deploy assessments that are more creative in their approach, such as portfolios, extended research assignments, team assignments, or laboratories. Although the need for straightforward assessment approaches are unlikely to be eliminated any time soon, these open-ended methods offer an alternative to traditional assessment techniques and provide a broader and more holistic method of understanding student abilities.

Also, these unconventional methods often provide greater opportunities for student learning than standard assessment methods, which is particularly valuable given the increased focus on more traditional, standardized testing in academic settings today. However, access to technology can be very helpful for instructors in refining traditional qualitative assessments, such as multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank tests. Even standardized assessment, with the use of technology, can become potentially more valuable for instructors.

For example, when assessing the results of a multiple-choice test, the instructor can see what questions students most frequently circled as incorrect, and specifically which incorrect responses were most attractive to students. Technology can also help highlight what students have improved or not improved in their test performance over the course of the semester by tracking student grades, on easily-read graphs, which can serve as a dramatic illustration of student progress for the teacher.

If student performance was particularly poor on a particular unit or cluster of concepts, the teacher can target these areas for more extensive review. Technology thus allows for a more in-depth means of obtaining valuable feedback from test results as well as greater speed of assessment. Technology allows instructors to use feedback to improve both lesson plans and assessments by providing information about how students approach tests as well as how they learn. While many students claim that they are poor test takers because of nerves, some students do poorly.