Effective Research-Based Assessments

As with any type of assessment, a well-defined purpose helps drive your assessment design and focus students on demonstrating their understanding or learning. Students often struggle to understand the relevance of assignment tasks to their own goals. Make these connections explicit with a clear description of the purpose of the assessment and the skills students will develop.

• Align your assessment to course learning outcomes, program goals, and specific information literacy practices or concepts.
• Consider how your course fits into the larger program. What research tasks have students already been exposed to? What future research activities can you prepare them for?
• On your instruction sheet, clearly identify the purpose of the assessment and the skills students will learn. See the Transparency in Learning and Teaching Project (TILT) for examples.

Students often view assignments as checklists to be completed, rather than an iterative process of exploration and discovery. As a result, overemphasis on the end product can result in selecting sources and completing tasks to meet basic criteria. In addition, the risk of breaches of academic integrity increase as students focus on producing rather than learning.

• Use phrases like 'explore', 'gather', or 'curate' rather than only 'find' or 'select'.
• Set aside time to practice the skills required for the assessment. Model for learners how you would think through or approach specific tasks or the project as a whole.
• Chunk your assessment into stages so that you can provide support and feedback throughout the process.
• Develop rubrics that assess evidence of the process students used and choices they made, in addition to the effectiveness of the final product.
• Assess metacognitive tasks or activities where students reflect on what they've learned about their topic, the sources they encountered, and the strategies they used to gather information.

Tasks should be manageable within the time frame allowed, as well as challenging without being excessively frustrating. Consider the competing obligations students may be experiencing. Overburdening students can lead to anxiety, satisficing (meeting bare minimum requirements), negative associations with research, and increased breaches of academic integrity.

• Test out your assessment before assigning it to students. Make sure you have a clear idea of what the students will need to do and understand in order to complete the assessment well.
• Remove unnecessary tasks outside of the learning goals for the assessment -- for example, you could provide a selection of topics or sources, direct learners to specific databases or sites, complete portions of the assessment with the assistance of a generative artificial intelligence tool, or require students to do everything necessary to prepare for the final output (e.g., essay), without having to submit a final output.
• If requiring specific resources, such as specific databases or journals, check that the library holds these items and ask your librarian if there are other resources you might consider.
• Align your tasks as closely as possible to tasks students will need to complete in their chosen discipline or profession. For example, students studying hair design might be tasked with researching and recreating a hairstyle from a previous era.
• Emphasize due dates as a tool to help students manage their time, rather than as a hard deadline.
• If you notice students are struggling too much, contact a librarian to help you assess the bottleneck.