Designing assessment activities
Assessment activities can provide more useful information for the purposes of making judgements at key points (including assigning grades for the School Certificate) if they provide assessment information across a range of syllabus outcomes within the one activity. The Board of Studies supports the use of assessment activities that cover a range of outcomes.Designing assessment activities does require some planning, and the following points summarise the key features of - and considerations for - planning effective assessment activities.
Areas for assessment have been developed for each course and appear at the top of each set of course performance descriptors. They show manageable groupings of outcomes that summarise the intent of the syllabus. By mapping the areas for assessment to activities when designing an assessment schedule, teachers can ensure that assessment in relation to all outcomes can occur across the year or stage, in a manageable way. In turn, each assessment activity can be linked to one or more of the areas for assessment for a course. In this website, activities presented for each course show the areas for assessment they are linked to, as well as the outcomes.
Effective assessment activities:
- connect naturally with what has been taught and allow students to make their own connections with concepts they have previously learned
- address a range of outcomes in the one activity and are thus time efficient and manageable
- explicitly describe the expectations and requirements of the activity to the learner
- engage the learner, are worthwhile activities for student learning, and are relevant to real life situations
- provide opportunities for all students whilst encouraging higher order thinking, depth of knowledge and understanding
- can be undertaken using a range of methods or approaches and provide for a variety of ways in which students learn
- provide for a range of student responses
- help you determine if students are ready to move on to the next stage in their learning
- represent ways in which their knowledge, skills and understanding can be applied to new situations.
Improving and refining assessment schedules and individual activities is an ongoing process. It is usually not necessary to create totally new schedules or individual activities. Current activities can be modified to maximise the evidence of student achievement gathered.