Assessment, Test, and Assignment Design

OTEI Resources:

Assignments

  • This Learning-Focused Assignment Guide can guide your assignment design and redesign, for a more transparent, learning-centered assessment.

  • Take our asynchronous Canvas course, "Assignment Design," co-sponsored by Undergraduate Studies, for professional development on these tools. Completion comes with a certification letter for your dossier.  Instructions to complete are included in the course.

  • This pdf provides reflection activities for different purposes such as deeper learning, improved student self-reflection, critical thinking.

  • AI is impacting MANY of our assessments--papers, projects, and tests.  Fortunately, there are many HE groups working hard to gather information to support instructors and students. Consult our curated guide to Teaching and AI.

Test Construction

  • In addition to the assignment guide, there is a parallel guide for Learning-Focused Test Construction and Implementation Guide, as well as a test blueprint for assessing the overall structure of your tests. 

  • Exam wrapper assignment: "exam wrappers" also called cognitive wrappers, are activities for students to reflect on their test performance and how they studied for the test.  It helps both students as well as instructors, since you can give advice to students based on their answers.

Formative Feedback

  • See reflection activities above
  • Find out how students are learning during the semester using easy, classroom assessment techniques (CATS).  These formative feedback activities help you learn and support student learning.

Rubrics

Rubrics can help you save time when grading, provide effective feedback for your students, and promote student learning. Learn what a rubric is, why and when to use different types of rubrics, and how to develop a rubric. You can find a rubric template, support materials, and rubric examples at in our Google drive: http://bit.ly/2O0zVR5. Clemson Libraries has an online copy of this useful book: An Introduction to Rubrics.

 

External Resources:

Assessment Options

Assessment of Student Learning Gains: Known as the FLAG site, it summarizes research done at several major universities on assessing students learning gains and the most effective methods, as perceived by students. The site gives access to a broad collection of classroom assessment techniques for science, mathematics, engineering and technology courses.

Clemson Libraries has an online copy of this useful book: An Introduction to Rubrics.

Test Question Construction

  1. Handbook on Test Question Construction: This short guide gives you a quick glance at what you should and should not do in writing test questions and multiple choice answers. From the Testing and Evaluation Services from University of Wisconsin-Madison.

  2. Constructing Written Test Questions: The National Board of Medical Examiners wrote this 181-page guide for faculty in the basic and clinical sciences but its good advice applies to all disciplines. It includes these topics, among others: sampling, psychometric considerations, multiple-choice items, matching items, true-false items, one-best-answer items, technical flaws in items, "irrelevant difficulty" and imprecise terms.

  3. The college instructor's guide to writing test items : measuring student learning. M. Rodriguez (2017). Online book available in Clemson Libraries. An up-to-date resource, this book has clear advice and examples.

 Academic Integrity on Tests

Consult Clemson policy and refer questions to academic leadership.  You may also find helpful resources from Clemson Online's Faculty Resource Center, as well as the Eberly Center cheating problems and solutions to support academic integrity.  For more individualized support, contact OTEI for a consultation.