Assessments are used to evaluate learner progress towards, and accomplishment of, course outcomes.
Types of Assessment (Carnegie Melon University, 2020)
- Formative: The goal of formative assessment is to monitor student learning to provide ongoing feedback that can be used by instructors to improve their teaching and by students to improve their learning. More specifically, formative assessments:
- help students identify their strengths and weaknesses and target areas that need work
- help faculty recognize where students are struggling and address problems immediately
- Summative: The goal of summative assessment is to evaluate student learning at the end of an instructional unit by comparing it against some standard or benchmark. Summative assessments are often high stakes, which means that they have a high point value.
The following video provides additional information about how to design assessments, including tangible ways that you can evaluate students both formatively and summatively throughout your course.