Instructor perspectives on the use of tag-organised assessment to facilitate formative assessment strategies in STEM courses

Abstract

ABSTRACT As classroom diversity increases across educational domains, additional stress is placed on instructors to provide effective and personalised learning experiences. Formative assessments can inform instructors of learning differences between student cohorts and individual students, allowing adaptation of learning experiences to individual student needs. This work is motivated by the need for faculty to implement formative assessment strategies, such that instructors can adapt the classroom-assessment environment by identifying learning goals, categorising or tagging assessment questions by learning goal categories, and organising the assessment data by tag. This paper summarises how tag-organised assessment (TOA) may be implemented and visualised to facilitate formative assessment strategies. We validated our TOA approach by interviewing instructors on needs in classroom-assessment environments and the usefulness of TOA visualisations to address assessment needs. Instructors perceived TOA visualisations as beneficial for synchronising learning goals with assessment coverage, improving student feedback, and communicating learning goals and success criteria to students.