Assessment in higher education drives continuous improvement. It ensures that learning is tested, encouraged, and understood. Each assessment gives institutions valuable data on programs that work and those that need improvement, allowing institutions to focus their efforts on the quality of education.
To drive meaningful change, you need a comprehensive view of student performance, including personal and professional development. This information can be used to prepare students for their careers, boost engagement, and focus on retention.
Innovative assessment practices can help you achieve these goals. They provide multiple viewpoints on success and engagement and give you the tools to handle the demands of modern students.
Traditional assessment faces many challenges. Outdated technology can lead to duplicative efforts, and siloed data can make getting a holistic view of student performance challenging. Technology is tackling these challenges, making tracking innovative assessment practices like collaborative and culturally responsive assessment easier.
Innovative assessments provide a comprehensive understanding of student abilities. They allow students to prepare better for their careers and give higher education institutions a clear direction for continuous improvement. The more qualitative and quantitative data you have on overall student performance, the better you can adjust your programs. You can also refine your student support services to boost retention and support student success.
Some of the many benefits of new assessment practices for students include:
As technology evolves, we have access to different forms of assessment. Each focuses on a different aspect of the student experience. When combined, they provide holistic and actionable improvement opportunities for institutions. New assessment practices continue to transform education, but some of the most effective benefit students, faculty, and administrators. They include:
Formative assessment is ongoing and informal. It helps faculty monitor student progress in real time and adjust when necessary. This assessment provides immediate feedback, guiding and improving each student’s learning experiences while keeping them engaged. It remains one of the most effective ways of shifting the focus away from grading and toward supporting their holistic development.
Many innovative approaches to formative assessment exist, including strategic questioning and analyzing the work of students. These strategies provide faculty with valuable insights into student progress and understanding, allowing for targeted and personalized feedback and teaching modifications.
Formative assessment allows students to improve continuously throughout their education. It helps them understand their strengths and growth areas, laying the foundation for a personalized learning process. It’s also an excellent method for institutions to gather data on their teaching processes. You can use it to gather insights into student attitudes, skills, learning styles, and challenges. With this information, you can tailor your instruction to meet the diverse needs of students.
Authentic assessments are realistic assessments that simulate relevant real-world tasks. They measure student performance, competence, and the transferability of their knowledge and skills. They may include role-play, demonstrations, or portfolios. Authentic assessments help students engage with their learning and understand the relevance of their course material to their future careers.
This assessment can enhance each student’s critical thinking and problem-solving, and it helps students analyze and apply what they have learned to their intended careers. Instead of studying and reproducing information, students can get creative. Because they involve real-world tasks, they are more engaging and motivating for students. They also provide specific and actionable information about what students understand and what they still need to learn. This data is invaluable when mapping your curriculum and making decisions to improve course quality.
In simple terms, technology-enhanced assessment involves using technological tools to conduct assessments. However, the term encompasses far more than that. It plays a critical role in personalized, student-centered learning and lets faculty pinpoint individual challenges students face and address them in real time.
One of the principal benefits of this assessment type is that it maximizes the quality of interaction between students and their questions. You can present information in various formats, including video, text, and graphics, which cater to different learning styles. Technology-enhanced assessments often provide a genuine environment where students can apply their knowledge in real-life scenarios.
One of the primary benefits of technology-enhanced assessment for institutions is access to student data. With real-time information, you can inform decision-making and address improvement opportunities during learning instead of after. By the time students reach the end of a course, they will have enjoyed many opportunities to improve along the way.
The right course evaluation tool can simplify the surveying process and convert results into actionable next steps. It can also help you inspire curricular and program enhancements by including students’ feedback in your annual assessment cycles. With the right software on your side, you can take advantage of quality feedback, deeper insights, and instant results.
If a person is competent, they have the knowledge, skills, and social ability to fulfill their roles. In higher education, competency-based assessment evaluates the skills, abilities, and knowledge based on specific competencies and job requirements. For example, faculty may ask students to submit videos or solve a career-specific problem. These assessments help faculty determine whether students can synthesize and use information meaningfully and practically.
These assessments offer a holistic view of each student’s learning progress and attitudes, which faculty can use to engage them and meet their unique needs. It also offers practical experience that molds the next generation of leaders through real-world experience, which is traditionally unavailable in classroom settings.
The better your institution can prepare students for meaningful careers, the more likely they will enroll. Competency-based assessment can help you attract diverse students and gain detailed insights into their progression. The data you gather from these assessments helps you understand program effectiveness and identify opportunities to make them more relevant in the real world.
Collaborative assessment involves reciprocal feedback among faculty and students and between student groups. It takes many forms, including verbal feedback, co-constructing rubrics, practice evaluations and group grading. While it may or may not include a grading element, it has a proactive, planned structure.
One of the clear benefits of collaborative assessment is engaging students and empowering them to guide their learning. Students gain the knowledge and experience of their peers and faculty — a diverse group that supports critical thinking and cultural competence. It also gives institutions a vehicle to measure student engagement through participation in class discussions and other group activities. Faculty can use this information to identify disengaged students and take the necessary steps to get them back on track to course completion.
Self- and peer assessment means having students critically reflect on, record the process of, and sometimes suggest grades for their own or their peer’s learning. It encourages students to take responsibility for their learning. In many cases, it’s also more effective than evaluator assessment if you conduct it anonymously through online platforms.
These assessments promote healthy self-reflection — an invaluable tool in the working world. They are also beneficial in calculating final grades, as they add a sense of objectivity to the process. They also have the potential to improve academic performance significantly. Again, these assessments encourage student engagement.
Students actively assess their work and seek input from others. They can only do this when engaged in the course material and forming meaningful connections. In this way, self-and peer assessment promotes cultural competence, as students must learn to understand diverse perspectives to provide fair and accurate assessments.
Culturally responsive assessment eliminates bias and allows students to account for their diverse backgrounds. They can bring their cultural references and fluencies into demonstrations of achievement and provide a link between their everyday cultural experiences and test items.
The benefits of culturally responsive assessment are clear. It allows your institution to develop a truly diverse and supported student body, which boosts engagement and retention. It helps faculty understand diverse groups and their cultural differences and supports the development of culturally relevant curricula.
Institutions can use these assessments to measure the trajectories of students with diverse backgrounds over time. Then, identify opportunities to improve their culturally responsive teaching. High dropout rates among diverse student groups indicate that teaching programs require improvement. Assessments focusing on class and activity participation rates can help identify classes lacking culturally responsive elements.
Assessments generate massive amounts of data, which can transform the way your institution approaches student success. However, the data is only meaningful if you can synthesize it into actionable reports. Purpose-built software solutions bridge the gap between data and improvement. They help you use data to inform decision-making, engage students and provide them with the resources they need to succeed in higher education and beyond.
Some of the many ways you can use software to track student success outcomes and support continuous improvement include:
Although the benefits of innovative assessment practices are clear, you may face some challenges when integrating them into your existing setup. For example, students familiar with summative assessment may find other assessment types challenging and resist change. Other challenges include ensuring inclusive assignments to maintain equity and resistance to group work. Faculty may also find new assessments challenging, especially with a lack of training. Time management is also a concern — faculty may spend more time mastering new assessments than engaging with students.
You can combat many of these challenges with the right approach. Some solutions to streamline innovative assessment implementation include:
Various types of innovative assessment can improve student and institutional outcomes, provided you have the data to inform change. With the Watermark Educational Impact Suite (EIS), you have the complete toolkit to transform your institution through assessment. Our integrated hub of tools provides the insights you need to maximize your educational impact.
Streamline and strengthen your assessment practices with qualitative and quantitative data to get the big picture, measure your effectiveness, and communicate it to stakeholders from one system. Schedule a demo and transform your assessment practices today!
