What Makes a Good Assessment? Assessments for Learning

Abstract

We present in this paper a ‘how-to’ frameworkfor designing motivating assessments, based upon thecognitive theories of expectancy-value and of aligned andauthentic objectives. The framework recasts thesecognitive theories into more practical steps of determiningobjectives, setting expectations, and framing theassessment to be well scoped, authentic, and relatable. Inthe Fall 2017 offering of our Introduction to MechanicalEngineering course, two new short design challenges andone long design challenge were piloted after beingdesigned according to the objectives-expectations-framingframework. In each case, the assessments were designed tobe (to varying extents) engaging/authentic (something thatstudents would want to do), and doable/relatable(something the students could do). The term long project(of largest scope, authenticity, and relatability) was foundby student survey to be the most motivating. Of the twosmaller projects, the second, while seemingly moreauthentic and relatable, was found to be less motivating.We understand this to be due to the context of thisassessment coming during a time in the term when studentwere busy with the term design project and other courses.