Aligning Assessment with Outcomes

Be explicit about constructive alignment

"Constructive alignment" (Biggs & Tang, 2007) entails designing learning and assessment around the intended learning outcomes. If learning and planned activities explicitly state their alignment with learning outcomes, students can construct their own learning.

The diagram below shows alignment as an iterative process, adjusted according to each experience of conducting a course.

Figure 1: Constructive alignment (Houghton, 2004)

When you plan assessment, and when you communicate the assessment plan to students, using a table or other visual aid can help illuminate the relationships between:

• the learning outcomes
• the learning activities and opportunities for formative feedback, and
• the gradable assessment tasks.

Figure 2 shows sample course learning outcomes mapped to both class discussion activities and assessment tasks, to check the validity of the assessment plan.

Mapping like this can reveal issues and omissions. For example, you might find that your assessment plan ignores some learning outcomes, or that you've set up a class activity that is unrelated to any of the learning outcomes.

Figure 2: Alignment of learning outcomes, learning activities, and assessment tasks (McIntyre, 2007)

Once you've mapped a course like this, you might need to reframe the learning outcomes themselves, so that they more clearly require observable desired action or behaviour, and relate that behaviour explicitly to course content and assessment tasks.

Check that outcomes are useful

Learning outcomes are useful when they are limited in number, and when each outcome:

• is framed as an achievable goal
• is clearly expressed so that its meaning is explicit
• places academic skills or personal learning in the context of the particular subject discipline
• includes a description of the kind of performances by which achievement will be judged (either within the outcome or in an associated set of assessment criteria)
• is specific about how complex and/or significant it is
• is memorable.

Select aligned assessment tasks

You can select assessment tasks that are aligned with course learning outcomes according to different schemes—two such schemes are described below.  

Tasks for different levels of learning

This Interactive Tutorial published by the Colorado Community Colleges Online:

• helps you analyse learning outcomes according to the cognitive domains elaborated in Bloom's Taxonomy (Bloom et al., 1956), and
• proposes a range of technology-enhanced learning and assessment activities within each domain.

Both the affective domain of attitudes, feelings and values (for example, Bloom et al., 1964) and the psychomotor domain of physical skills (for example, Dave, 1970) can be included, where relevant, in the types of learning outcomes to be translated into assessment plans.

Biggs and Tang's SOLO Taxonomy (Structure of the Observed Learning Outcome) (2007) is equally useful when you analyse learning outcomes with an eye to aligning them with assessment plans. The SOLO Taxonomy frames assessment tasks using verbs that indicate the increasing complexity of, and extent of relationships among, the ideas and concepts in which the task will engender learning.

Figure 3: SOLO Taxonomy (Biggs & Tang, 2007: 79)

Another way to determine which tasks will deliver particular learning outcomes is to analyse the outcomes in terms of the generic transferable skills and attributes they represent.  

Figure 4 groups learning outcomes into eight domains of generic skills and attributes, and lists a range of tasks and methods that might be useful in achieving each outcome (Dunn, 2010, adapted from Nightingale et al., 1996).

Figure 4: Suitable tasks according to generic domains of learning outcomes