Innovative Assessment and Evaluation Methods in Higher Education

Assessment and evaluation are fundamental components of the higher education landscape. These practices serve to measure student learning, evaluate performance, and provide valuable feedback that guides students toward academic and professional growth. While the core purpose of assessment-judging competence-and feedback-offering guidance-may seem straightforward, implementing effective assessment and feedback strategies in higher education is a multifaceted and challenging endeavor.

The Wicked Problem of Assessment

Forsyth (2023) aptly describes assessment as a "wicked problem," characterized by its uniqueness, ambiguity, numerous stakeholders with potentially conflicting values, and the absence of a single, universally correct solution. This complexity has spurred educational theorists and researchers to develop, test, and study various assessment and feedback models, exploring their implications for teaching and learning in higher education.

Faculty members play a crucial role in engaging students in understanding assessment expectations and feedback practices. Unpacking the nuances of assessment involves considering various aspects, including:

Formative and summative assessments
Assessment tasks and coursework
Classroom- and program-level outcomes
Criterion- and norm-referenced grading
Multiple stakeholders

Furthermore, the intent of assessment can be categorized as assessment of learning, assessment for learning (Boud et al. 2018), or a combination of both. Feedback, an integral part of assessment, serves purposes such as aiding future learning and justifying grades.

The Assessment Lifecycle Framework

Forsyth et al. (2015) propose an assessment lifecycle framework as a professional tool to understand and unpack assessment practices. This framework encompasses several phases:

Setting: Faculty develop and share assignment details, including mark allocation, assessment criteria, submission deadlines, submission methods, and the timeline for grade and feedback return.
Supporting: Students are informed about available resources, such as writing centers, to assist them in completing assessments.
Marking: Faculty carefully consider fairness and accuracy when assigning grades, providing feedback that identifies strengths and performance against learning outcomes.

Assessment Literacy: A Key Component

Forsyth (2023) defines assessment literacy as "a fluent understanding of the vocabulary, principles, and purposes of assessment and the ability to make informed and confident decisions about the design and management of assessment." Despite its importance, assessment literacy is often deprioritized by higher education faculty (Clark and Talbert 2023).

Assessment as a Practice

The lifecycle of assessment exists within a broader framework of teaching. Effective teaching is inseparable from effective assessment and feedback. Boud et al. advocate for acknowledging the everyday activities of assessment as conducted, without framing them normatively in terms of what assessment should do. This emphasizes assessment-as-practiced and how it operates, addressing issues often rendered invisible when assessment is configured as merely marking students.

Embracing assessment as a practice encourages faculty to consider diverse models that move beyond a measurement perspective toward more student-centered approaches. These models include, but are not limited to:

Learning-oriented assessments (Carless 2007)
Peer and self-assessments
Authentic assessment
Feedforward strategies
Contract grading
Ungrading (Stommel 2020)

When applying various assessment models, Wood (2021) encourages faculty to distinguish between learning goals and learning outcomes, with the latter being specific to students’ actions based on operational verbs (50). Many of these models promote student collaboration and buy-in when developing assessment expectations, along with student choice when completing assessments (O’Neill and Padden 2021).

Student-centered assessment practices encourage collaboration, choice, and active engagement in learning. The practice perspective of assessment accounts for effects on students and faculty and opens consideration to addressing equity in assessment.

Achieving Equity in Assessment

Driscoll (2021) offers simple strategies for achieving equity in assessment, starting with understanding students-who they are and how they learn. This practice aids in building caring classrooms that infuse culturally responsive teaching. Driscoll recommends that faculty look for opportunities to make each process in the assessment cycle more equitable for learners. These processes include:

Developing learning outcomes
Designing assignments and rubrics
Collecting student evidence
Reviewing and analyzing student evidence
Using evidence to change for improvement
Assessing changes for improvement (32)

The practice perspective of assessment and student-centered models can lead to deeper learning, greater student engagement, and positive impacts on underserved student populations.

Feedback as a High-Impact Practice

Feedback is an inherent feature of high-impact practices (HIPs), described by Kuh et al. (2017) as powerful interventions that foster student success. Student success is defined as "academic achievement, engagement in educationally purposeful activities, satisfaction, persistence, attainment of educational objectives, and acquisition of desired learning outcomes that prepare one to live an economically self-sufficient, civically responsible, and rewarding life" (Kuh et al.).

Eleven HIPs have been identified, along with eight key features. One feature is named as frequent, timely, and constructive feedback. Clark and Talbert (2023), authors of Grading for Growth, also offer alternative approaches to traditional models of assessment and feedback. These student-centered pillars prioritize growth and learning in response to clear content standards. Collecting and reviewing evidence of learning is a key part of equitable, culturally responsive assessment practices.

Drawing on these scholarly conversations about feedback, Moore (2023) identifies offering feedback as one of six key practices for fostering engaged learning.

Read also: Enhancing Student Growth

The Assessment Movement in Higher Education

While models of assessment and feedback have been in play since the beginning of higher education, it was only recently that assessment itself has become a field of study. According to Ewell and Cumming (2017), the assessment movement in higher education began in the mid-1980s. Within this movement, many have developed and shared research-informed practices related to assessment and feedback in extant literature. The research-informed practices provide faculty with guidance on how to conduct assessment through the duration of a course and how to use assessment data to make course improvements. Her work is based on extensive experience applying research-informed practices to institutional change efforts.

Bloom's Taxonomy

A well-known framework for the cognitive demand of learning objectives is Bloom’s Taxonomy, published in 1956. The levels in his taxonomy are based on the complexity and richness represented in a learning objective. These levels offer faculty and students a way to perceive a hierarchy of learning objectives and their associated assessment tasks. In 2001, a team revised the category names of Bloom’s Taxonomy from nouns to verbs. Moving from the bottom to the top of the pyramid represents a shift from lower-order thinking to higher-order thinking. Although this taxonomy has been critiqued for oversimplifying cognitive complexity, it remains a valuable tool for writing and assessing learning objectives.

Feedback Literacy

Feedback has been studied as a research-informed practice that deepens student learning and leads to significant learning gains. Numerous researchers have studied modes and characteristics of what makes for quality feedback. These principles focus on what the teacher does to improve feedback practices. In their article, Measuring What Learners Do in Feedback: The Feedback Literacy Behaviour Scale, Dawson et al. (2023) introduced their feedback literacy behavior scale (FLBS). This self-reported instrument is intended to measure students’ behaviors related to feedback rather than their perceptions or orientations. To use the FLBS students rank how often they exhibit particular behaviors associated with each factor on a scale, 1: never, 2: almost never, 3: rarely, 4: sometimes, 5: almost always, 6: always. Information on how the scale was created and how their work developed can be found at feedbackliteracy.org.

Technology and AI in Assessment

Educational researchers have also investigated technology use in assessment and feedback practices. These studies often focus on how faculty can offer feedback over technology platforms or how students can use technology to augment how they provide evidence of learning. Readily available generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) technology has changed the way faculty and students can interact with technology, access information, and produce new text, images, videos, software code and other forms of output.

Faculty have responded with concern over how students demonstrate evidence of their learning when this technology is accessible to them. As the availability of AI chatbots has increased, the notion of AI literacy has likewise gained traction. Long and Magerko (2020) define AI literacy as "a set of competencies that enables individuals to critically evaluate AI technologies; communicate and collaborate effectively with AI; and use AI as a tool online, at home, and in the workplace" (2). Within this context, some efforts have been undertaken to support faculty and students in considering how GenAI technology might be purposefully used in teaching and learning.

Regarding GenAI and assessment, the Artificial Intelligence-Supported Assessment (AI-SA) Framework (Trocki 2025) may prove beneficial. Technology, including AI, can support interactive and personalized assessment opportunities. In this work, an artificial-intelligence-supported assessment (AI-SA) is defined as an assessment that includes student utilization of AI technology, such as a chatbot, and provides the teacher with information about student progress towards achieving learning goals. A key part of the framework is its use of the terms AI-active and AI-inactive. AI-active refers to assessment components or tasks where students are directed to interact (e.g. prompt engineer) with AI technology, whereas AI-inactive refers to assessment components or tasks where students are not allowed to interact with AI technology. The framework is a list of questions that faculty should consider and respond to when developing AI-SAs.

To apply the AI-SA framework, faculty rank framework question responses using a Likert scale from one to five regarding the AI-SA they have developed or are developing. The quality of the AI-SA can then be assessed in individual framework question components and wholistically by calculating the average, median, or mode of the framework rankings.

Alternative Grading Models

This resource page addresses models of assessment and feedback outside of traditional assumptions and approaches. These alternate grading models often represent recent developments or work in progress and need to be researched for their efficacy. Three models that have gained traction are standards-based grading, specifications grading, and ungrading. The efficacy of each has been explored and documented to some degree, however much work needs to be done particular to their applications in various disciplines of higher education. Furthermore, many faculty use hybrid models that include some elements of alternative grading mixed with traditional grading, and these need to be studied as well. Collaborative conversations around student work allow feedback to guide understanding and support growth.

The Importance of Feedback

Practitioners and researchers have recognized the importance of feedback for student learning. A foundational characteristic to giving quality feedback is using clear and actionable learning objectives and giving students opportunities to act on that feedback. Additional research is needed to unpack what quality feedback entails unique to different disciplinary content. Feedback is a key feature of HIPs, and further research is needed to refine our knowledge of attributes of constructive feedback related to each HIP. Feedback literacy (Carless and Boud 2018) is a helpful construct to promote the understanding and use of feedback with students. Dawson et al.’s (2023) feedback literacy behavior scale (FLBS) can be used to gauge students’ behaviors related to feedback, but this instrument is limited to student self-reported behaviors. Additional research is needed about student and faculty perceptions of alternate grading and feedback. A deeper understanding of these perceptions will assist in promoting equity in assessment as described by Driscoll (2021). The practice perspective of assessment (Boud et al. 2018) gives theoretical grounding to alternative grading practices, but it is unknown how familiar faculty may be with this perspective. Instruments that can identify faculty awareness and knowledge of alternative grading tenants and approaches will assist in professionally developing faculty to incorporate these models.

Sustainable Assessment

Boud (2000) recommends sustainable assessment practices that address learning goals of higher education courses along with preparing students for their own assessment needs in the future. This two-pronged approach to assessment will assist faculty in reconsidering the models traditionally employed.

Authentic Assessment in the Age of AI

The word "Authentic" was selected as the 2023 word of the year by the Merriam-Webster dictionary; it was one of the most reviewed words in the dictionary's 500,000 entries. It is interesting to note that authenticity is a valued characteristic, particularly now in the age of Artificial Intelligence and rising importance of skills-infused learning through post-secondary education and career-rich experiences. With previous years assuming the responsibility of lifting many of us out of our pandemic-driven challenges, this year could certainly push us out of our comfort zones. And for higher education, this is hardly a business as usual request.

Challenges and Opportunities in Assessment

Several challenges and opportunities are trending in higher education assessment:

Moving Beyond Compliance: Shifting from compliance-minded assessment, which focuses on satisfying accreditation bodies, to collecting and reviewing data for institutional betterment. Assessment that matters includes collecting and acting on evidence of educational processes and outcomes, eliciting and using student perspectives in your improvement planning and documenting and communicating change. And it is not only an important function of an institutional member’s work, but necessary. It means stepping out of your comfort zone and stepping into a culture of improvement, where you have to look in the mirror and see the change that needs to be made and make it. This kind of assessment is the kind that separates your institution from others and what makes you an authentic assessment practitioner, department chair, dean, instructor, unit leader - you get the picture.
Varying Evidence Types: Providing concrete documentation of actions taken based on data, as opposed to simply stating intentions. The Middle States Commission on Higher Education (MSCHE) launched its newly revised accreditation standards which explicitly call for more concrete evidence of periodic planning, assessment and use of data for improvement. The updates reflect the Commission’s commitment to data-informed decision making-calling for its member institutions to collect, reflect and use data including disaggregated data to ensure they are meeting the needs of their students as outlined in their mission statement. 2023 ushered in this transformation of data collection to data actions. But now it is clear that just saying you are going to act versus providing concrete documentation of actually doing so are two very different pieces of evidence.
Strategic Plans as Living Documents: Utilizing strategic plans as objectives that represent and humanize the institution's mission, rather than as marketing campaigns. Integrated planning is where representatives of your institution are invited and accept a seat at the table, actively contributing to overall planning, assessing and providing opportunities to celebrate your hidden gems which are often uncovered in the process. Assessing your strategic plan means you have a process for capturing resource requests linked to objectives of the plan- shifting from gut-based decision making to data-driven decision making. It also means that there is clearly identifiable alignment between strategic planning objectives and administrative/academic unit objectives with measures and data to demonstrate how your strategic plan is a living, breathing component of your very existence as an institution of higher learning.
Connecting Curricular and Co-curricular Experiences: Making visible the intentional connections between curricular and co-curricular experiences to highlight the value of lifelong learning and skills-enablement. In that vein, students need to explicitly see the intentional connections between curricular and co-curricular experiences. This enables students to see the value of their contributions to their own learning and how these experiences provide lifelong learning opportunities and skills-enablement. In looking at the work of the Grand Challenges in Assessment, framing learning through learning outcomes of these experiences not only provides assessment of student learning, but provides visibility into the skill or competency behind the learning. This unlocks understanding and practical application of skills in different experiences across a student’s learning journey- on/off campus jobs, athletics, clubs and organizations, internships, study away and study abroad and more.

One way to tackle these challenges that are trending in higher education is to continue to lean into them instead of putting them on the back burner for another day. This day is here and there are plenty of opportunities to adapt the good practices our peers are actively engaged in at your institution. Get out there and meet them at conferences, online meetings, community interest groups.

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