Assess learners’ learning

How do you know that your learners learned what you wanted them to learn? How do you assess their knowledge or skills? What’s the best way to evaluate an assignment or a module completion?

Where do we start?

Therefore, one of the first things you have to consider, before even thinking of the evaluation, are your learning objectives. We are going to refer here mainly to the Bloom’s Taxonomy of learning objectives. The learning outcomes that you set at the beginning should describe what the learners will have achieved and can demonstrate at the end of your course.

The cognitive domain

The cognitive domain concerns the development of our intellectual skills. It is composed of 6 levels, in order of increasing complexity:

1. Knowledge (remember)
2. Comprehension (understand)
3. Application
4. Analysis
5. Synthesis
6. Evaluation

The cognitive domain is the “easiest” to measure compared with the affective and psychomotor domains. Here’s an example of questions/assignment for each level of the cognitive domain:

The affective domain

The affective domain concerns the motivation, feelings, attitudes and emotions of the learner. It is composed of 5 levels, in order of increasing complexity:

1. Receiving
2. Responding
3. Valuing
4. Organising
5. Characterising

The learning outcomes in the affective domain could go from the simple awareness to selective attention. The affective domain outcomes are therefore quite difficult to evaluate. How do you know that your students are motivated? How do you know they value something? The answer is probably that the instructors need to design their courses so as to integrate the affective domain and foster students motivation and participation. They can, when possible, set up regular feedback sessions/interactions with the learners ; encourage course participants to evaluate and select values on their own ; promote hands-on experience or collaborative activities.

The assessment of the affective domain relies mostly on the instructor’s observations and perceptions, or students self-reporting statements. Here’s a few examples:

The psychomotor domain

Finally, the psychomotor domain concerns the learning of physical skills. In Bloom’s and Harrow’s taxonomy there are 7 levels:

1. Perception (sensory guiding of motor activity)
2. Set (feeling ready to act)
3. Guided Response (beginning to learn complex skills)
4. Mechanism (developing basic proficiency)
5. Complex Overt Response (performing with advanced skill)
6. Adaptation (modifying movement to meet special circumstances)
7. Origination (creating situation-specific movements)

Psychomotor assessments range from identifying practical skills to designing practical test or developing skill assessment forms. The assessment is made through specific rubrics, conceived especially as a checklist to evaluate practical skills and activities. Here’s some examples* for rubrics criteria for the psychomotor domain levels:

*These examples were retrieved from theHoB.net

In conclusion

Assessments are a way of evaluating the knowledge and skills acquired during a learning activity. The type of assessment must take into account each of your learning objectives, so be coherent! Make sure to set measurable outcomes. Additionally, in order to measure the achievement of all your objectives, several types of assessments could be required, at different times.