Complete this brainstorm to start thinking through some ideas of how students might demonstrate mastery or learning of the essential areas of your course. How might they showcase their knowledge or skills?

Instructions:

Make a line down the middle of a page.
On the left list your Desired outcomes.
On the right, start to brainstorm how students might demonstrate mastery of these outcomes. What would constitute acceptable evidence of learning? Might one activity demonstrate mastery of two areas - or does each need its own assessment?

If you'd like to do this digitally, visit the appendix section of your Course Design Document.

Here's an example from a hypothetical Occupational Therapy Information Literacy course:

Your Desired Results

How might students demonstrate evidence of their learning about this?

Knowledge: an understanding of the structure of research papers.

Skills: skills to successfully navigate search engines and complete searches, select and critically evaluate published articles.

Understandings: Students will understand that not all research is created equal, and that fluent search methods and critical evaluation is crucial to being able to quickly locate quality research.

Transfer: Be able to efficiently find, critically evaluate and use published research in future courses and clinical practice.

Established Goals: How can we use published research in service of our practice and our clients' needs?

Essential Questions: How can we determine which published articles are relevant and worthy of our precious time as we develop client treatment plans?

Knowledge: Hmm, they could do something where they labeled the parts of a research paper

Skills: Well, they'll have to demonstrate that they can complete a search, select suitable articles, and show they can evaluate an article. Those sound like three separate things...

Understandings: I'm not sure they can demonstrate this, since it's a shift in attitude. BUT they can show the results: doing good searches, having an efficient process, and choosing good, appropriate high-quality sources. How might I learn more about their process, and not just their product?

Transfer: Ok, if these are the key skills they need to leave with...what if they do each of these things (share search results, critique an article, and select appropriate articles) but each component has a reflective piece where they describe their process, and skills they used to make it a more critical, efficient process. And there can be some self- assessment - what's coming easily, what's still a challenge. That could work!

Adapted from Vanderbilt's Understanding by Design article