How to Put Into Practice
The benefits of giving students frequent and varied opportunities to demonstrate their learning are manyfold. Knowledge-checks designed to give students insights into their level of understanding can help them alter their study habits as required and help you target your instruction where necessary ahead of higher-stakes assessments. Assignments that incorporate student choice, student interests, and connections to the real world deepen their engagement. All these practices encourage academic integrity and enhance students’ capacity and motivation to bring intentional, rigorous attention to their own work.
Varieties of Assessment
Review some varieties of assessment to help you select the strategies best suited to a course. The two concepts to focus on are: (1) the purpose of the assessment (what you want to get out of having students demonstrate their learning); and (2) the form of the assessment (what students actually do)-both of which are aligned to the learning outcomes of the course.
A common framework for describing assessment is to break down assessments into three different purposes: diagnostic, formative, and summative.
Diagnostic Assessments
Diagnostic assessments provide a quick look into what students know or understand at the start of a period of time (the start of a course, unit, or class session). These are usually brief, informal, and ungraded. Examples include:
Writing/response prompts
Ask your learners to respond in writing or alternative formats, such as audio, video, or using graphics, to a case study, example, or sample scenario,before you cover the content or practice together. Collect and review the responses to determine where the knowledge is already strong, and where, instead, you need to focus your instruction. Avoid grading these responses, unless as part of a larger “participation” grade element. You can also ask students to critique an AI-generated problem or essay to establish a critical baseline of their analytical skills.
Informal reading assessments
Ask students to read a brief sample (250-750 words, typically) of professional writing in your field, and then take a quick (10 or fewer questions) ungraded reading quiz about the primary lessons or take-aways from the reading. Use the results to identify topics for further discussion.
Pre-tests
If you plan to have your students take graded unit tests or quizzes regularly, give them a small, ungraded sample of the same assessments before they begin. Using a quiz tool within your LMS, create a quiz with a small number of questions about the unit’s learning outcomes, or share a list of questions similar to, but not identical, the questions students will encounter on the graded test or quiz. Use the performance on the pre-test to focus questions and study for each unit, and prior to the graded tests.
Surveys
Use a survey tool within your LMS or a Google Form to create brief check-ins with your students. The shorter, the better, as a survey with just two questions can provide actionable information about your students and their learning.
Here are a couple of sample questions:
- Respond honestly: how much of the reading are you doing? [100%, 80%, 50%, 10%, none]
- What is the one thing that is getting in the way of you being able to give your best effort to the course right now?
Journaling
Ask students to create a Google Doc for themselves and share it with you. Provide them with a prompt, or just ask them to keep a regular track of their course experience. Read selectively, especially if you have a large-enrollment and use your learning to adapt and update your course interactions.
Formative assessments
Formative assessments monitor student learning on an ongoing basis with the goal of providing actionable feedback to students and informing instruction. This helps you and your students resolve areas of confusion before they approach summative or higher-stakes assessments. These can be graded or not, and usually entail a significant feedback component. Examples include:
Discussions
Discussions offer a way for students to share their learning while discovering what other students have learned. You can use discussions to assess student engagement with the course, or as a way to promote critical thinking. For an online or hybrid course, you can create a graded discussion in your course management system or manually grade a discussion in Piazza. Piazza is a student-driven question and answer service that allows students to collaboratively work on answers by adding, modifying, or deleting content.
Low-stakes writing assignments
Low-stakes writing assignments are brief, informal tasks, for example, minute papers, in-class brainstorms, or end-of-session reflection slips, designed to give students space to experiment, take chances, and develop ideas without the pressure of high-stakes assessment. In a face-to-face class, try these:
- Open a topic with a 3-minute free-write in response to the following prompt: “What do you already know about X?”. Free-write is what you ask the students to write for a set period of time (10-15 minutes) without stopping and worrying about spelling or grammar mistakes
- Use pair-shares where students jot down a question then discuss it with a neighbour
- Close the session by asking each student to write one thing that’s still unclear to them — which you address at the start of the next class.
Low-stake activities can also include co-writing” with AI—such as asking an AI tool to generate counter arguments to a student’s thesis and having the student write a quick response paper addressing those counter arguments.
In an online or hybrid format, you can use online discussions, quizzes, or Google Forms to host brief writing activities. You can also use the chat function in Zoom for students to respond to short writing assignments. For longer pieces of writing, create an assignment in the gradebook to assess their work and provide feedback.
Peer review
Peer review gives students the opportunity to assess their classmates’ work, as well as gain new perspectives from how classmates approach and solve problems. To help peer review work in class, provide students with a tight focus rather than an open-ended brief: two central questions are often enough — “What is the writer trying to say?” and “How can they make that argument more effective?” Before they start, spend a few minutes distinguishing revision from editing — students tend to jump straight to grammar; redirect them toward larger concerns like clarity of purpose, structure, and focus. Structure the group time clearly: the writer opens by stating their main concerns, each reader reflects back what they heard as the central idea, then the group moves into open discussion, and the writer closes by summarising what they plan to do next. Encourage honest but constructive responses by asking students to use “I” language (“I’m confused when…”, “I’d like to hear more about…”) rather than directive “you should” feedback. Finally, do it more than once — peer review takes practice, and a second or third session pays back the upfront investment you put into preparing students for the first.
Quizzes
Create regular low-stake quizzes on content to help keep students on track and set a baseline for assessing learning. Check your LMS setting as it can make grading and providing feedback on both long and short-answer questions faster. Many types of quiz questions can be automatically graded by LMS, and it may also be possible to set it up to provide feedback. Check with your institution to find out what is possible.
Summative Assessments
Summative assessments are designed for students to demonstrate what they have learned at the end of a period of time (e.g., the end of a unit or course). These assessments measure students’ cumulative understanding and skills in relation to the course learning outcomes. Summative assessments also provide students with an opportunity to demonstrate deeper learning. Summative assessments are usually graded, and feedback often focuses on what to do differently in future. Examples include:
Group projects or presentations
Although it may look and feel a bit different, group projects and presentations can be conducted both in-person and online. Course management systems have easy ways to create groups, which can support students in submitting group assignments. Students can create and record presentations (e.g., with PowerPoint) in their own time, and submit them for you and/or their peers to review. Student presentations can also be conducted live with other students participating via these web conferencing options. As with any synchronous activities, bandwidth use and limitations should be taken into consideration, as some students may not have access to reliable internet. Research shows that the manner in which an instructor implements and facilitates a group project has a significant impact on the success of the group project. See Assessing Group Work course (OneHE free course, no membership required) for how to scaffold and grade group projects.
Papers
Term papers or final projects, often called high-stakes writing assessments, can be stressful for students who arrive with fixed ideas about what “good writing” looks like and a history of discouraging feedback. The antidote is intentional assignment design: good writing assignments promote critical thinking and engagement with course material, and how you present them directly affects student success.
Start with a clear assignment sheet that names the central task, states the learning outcomes explicitly, and gives genre-specific guidance on structure — students often struggle simply because they’ve never written in that format before. Rather than dropping students into a final paper cold, scaffold the work through a sequence of shorter tasks that move from simple to complex — a working research question, an annotated bibliography, a peer-reviewed draft — so that by submission day, the thinking is already well underway.
Building in multiple opportunities for feedback, brainstorming, and outlining keeps students focused on the writing process. Finally, consider whether a traditional paper is the only viable format: offering multimodal alternatives — audio, video, presentation-based submissions — can improve accessibility and inclusivity without sacrificing rigour or depth of engagement.
Depending on the length and format of a writing assignment, you can use an LMS discussion tool or quizzes to assess student learning. The chat function in web conferencing platforms can also be used for students to respond to short writing assignments. For more formal papers, creating an assignment and grading it using a course management systems gradebook is a recommended way to assess the work and provide feedback.
Mid-term and final exams
- During online instruction, consider breaking up your traditional exams and major projects into smaller pieces. Both short or long-answer questions can be graded in course management systems. You can also:
- create a question bank for quizzes and exams
- set up quiz questions to be randomly assigned
- set a time limit on completing questions
- use a proctoring tool.
For guidance on creating reliable exams, see Best Practices for Designing and Grading Exams (University of Michigan).
Variety in how assignments are graded
Using a mix of graded and ungraded assessments, and varying the stakes of graded assignments, helps reinforce the purpose of each assessment. For instance, a knowledge-check quiz intended to surface common misunderstandings about a concept is best implemented as either an ungraded activity or a low-stakes complete/incomplete assignment. This is consistent with its purpose as a learning tool, allowing students to revisit and deepen their understanding ahead of a higher-stakes assessment of their learning. See Alternative Approaches To Grading (a free OneHE resource) for some additional ideas on alternative grading methods.
Classroom assessment techniques
Classroom assessment techniques (CATS) are menus of in-class formative assessments that tell you what students are learning and how you might adjust your instruction. See Classroom Assessment Techniques (a free OneHE resource) for additional techniques.
- While CATS originated with face-to-face instruction, many techniques convert well to synchronous or asynchronous activities.
- Feedback on CATS is often informal and delivered to the group as a whole. One might quickly skim, for example, a set of responses to a Two-Minute Paper (a free OneHE resource) question and then take a few minutes in class or in a feedback video to share with the class what you noticed and address confusions.
Frequent and varied assessments mean adding alternatives to high-stakes assessments into a course: frequent, low-stakes assessments and alternative assessments can scaffold or replace some high-stakes assessments.
Real-world connections
Consider designing assessments that connect to the real world by asking students to perform or create tasks that exist outside of the classroom, respond to real-life situations, or draw on professional practice in a field or discipline. Authentic assessments that require localized context, interview data, field observation are resilient to AI-generated responses because they require human interaction, first-hand experience and contextual understanding that is difficult for AI to simulate.
- This OneHE free course Creating Authentic Assessments for Agency and Equity offers a brief but substantive introduction to authentic assessment approach with examples from various disciplines.
- Using case studies, such as Monash University’s activity is an accessible and engaging strategy for promoting critical thinking, applying concepts to real-world situations, and encouraging deeper student engagement.
Student choice and creation
Introduce elements of student choice into how they demonstrate their learning.
- For example, a final project might ask students to express their learning in one of several forms (e.g., paper, video, audio podcast, or a website).
- On a smaller scale, students might select their own project topics with your approval, or participate in generating high-quality questions (Duke University) and responses that will feed into the question bank for a quiz.
- Consider using a student-generated rubric to increase student engagement and understanding of assessment expectations. Share examples of completed assignments and help students identify the characteristics of high-quality work which they can then use to develop rubric criteria.
Scaffolding and sequencing.
Breaking up a longer assignment into its component skills and tasks is an effective way to increase the variety and frequency of assessments throughout a course.
Individual and collaborative.
Mixing individual and collaborative work creates variety while strengthening peer interaction and connection. For guidance on group work, see these free OneHE courses: Leading In-Class Group Work and Assessing Group Work.
Reflection and metacognition.
Metacognition, or thinking about one’s own thinking, helps students’ process and apply their learning more effectively to new contexts. Brief reflection questions encourage this type of thinking while also delivering formative assessment by asking students to demonstrate their learning-in-progress. For instance, after a group discussion or forum interaction, you might ask, “What is one thing that you learned from a classmate?” or “How did your understanding of this topic shift after watching this video?” Students can also submit an AI generated reflection: what prompts did they use? How did they verify the AI’s output? What did they change and why?