Assess Student Learning

Community college students come to class with varied background and skills, and so continuous assessment becomes particularly important for any instructor. In Scenario-Based Learning, students have many informal opportunities to compare their skills with peers as they solve complex problems, but there is little opportunity to record these lessons learned in more traditional, formal ways. Some may say, "So what? Why is formal testing important? As long as the students are engaged, I'm satisfied!"

Assessment is the process of documenting that learning has occurred. The reason assessment is important -- even in an active-learning curriculum like Scenario-Based Learning -- is that the more an instructor understands what and how students are learning with the curriculum, the better an instructor can use the curriculum.

A primary goal of the Scenario-Based Learning project is transparency around assessment. By employing a key feature of the Principled Assessment Designs for Inquiry (PADI) process in the design of Scenario-Based tasks, we make it easy for any instructor who wants to use our materials to understand how to measure and document student learning. Our In-Class assessment templates and Test Item templates describe what skills our instructor-designers intend to teach and how they measure student performance. Our test items have gone through a validation process that ensures they are aligned with what students are actually learning through the curriculum.