To apply the principles of inclusiveness and sustainability in your course assessments throughout your course consider the following:

Begin by seeking input from your students

As discussed in module 1, at the beginning of a course, surveys can be used to discover students’ incoming knowledge and skills as well as something about them as a person. Rather than focusing on knowledge deficits that the curriculum must fill, this kind of pre-assessment will allow you to discover students’ interests, lived experiences, and motivations. Equitable assessments should be accessible and responsive to students who have difficulty accessing computational tools, reliable high-speed internet, and a quiet work space, as well as those who have constraining personal responsibilities and challenges, such as caring for a loved one. Therefore, it will be important for you to know about your students to guide your course planning. In a pre-assessment, you can:

Ask students to share what they are most excited about in the class, unique skills they are proud of, past educational experiences, and their own perceptions of their current knowledge and skills.
Use students’ input to help them build connections between the course content and their interests.
To help students take ownership in creating spaces that welcome all members of the course, invite students to contribute to a list of community learning agreements for class interactions.
Where possible, provide opportunities for students to make choices about an assessment topic or format that leverages their skills and interests to help them feel more empowered and engaged in the course.

Use frequent, low-stakes assessment to guide students’ learning throughout the course

As your course progresses, use assessments as a learning tool that can develop the students’ sense of belonging in the course community, as well as a shared responsibility for and awareness of their learning. There are many ways to accomplish this. Here are a few:

Include a variety of low-stakes activities and assignments early and frequently such as short quizzes, reflective writing prompts, group projects, and discussions. This allows students to calibrate your expectations, get feedback they can incorporate into future work, and understand their individual progress. (Ways to make assessments low-stakes: grade based on effort, allow collaboration, allow revision and resubmission.)
Use online discussions to build opportunities for interaction that develop students’ sense of belonging and motivate them to learn from each other through their responses and questions to each other.
Guide opportunities for effective peer feedback by modeling it yourself, highlighting examples of productive exchanges, prompting students to ask each other guiding questions, and asking them to use rubrics / clear criteria to guide and assess their responses.
Before students hand in work, ask them to self-evaluate according to the grading criteria and to identify areas where they would most benefit from your feedback.

Focus final assessments on applying key concepts from throughout the course and developing disciplinary skills

Many instructors are concerned about academic integrity in high-stakes, closed-book exams, and while tips exist to discourage cheating, students are more likely to learn from (and less likely to cheat on) assessments that provide authentic experiences or reflection on learning. Students can demonstrate their achievement of the course goals by applying disciplinary tools to real-world situations, analyzing authentic data or exploring solutions to so called “wicked problems.” These are problems that have changing parameters, are resistant to solutions, involve incomplete data, or are difficult to recognize (Hanstedt 2018). Creative projects with formative feedback will support students in developing the sustainable assessment skills necessary for lifelong learning.

Consider the following:

To synthesize key ideas or reflect on what they’ve learned, have students write research reports or papers. These can provide opportunities to practice disciplinary language and styles of communication.
To creatively demonstrate learning, have students create artifacts such as maps, figures, photo essays, journals, videos, blogs, podcasts, or portfolios. Structure checkpoints/milestones with opportunities for formative feedback to help students successfully complete these projects.
To learn how to self-assess the quality of their work, have students use use rubrics, peer-feedback, and/or compare it to exemplary examples.

This 5 min video shows an example "creative finale" (student final project) from an Environmental Biology course digital storytelling group project .

Whatever forms of assessment you choose, clear communication is critical to student success. Start each unit with a brief overview of how all the course components fit together and alert students to upcoming deadlines. Make sure to inform them how each assessment will be useful for their learning, make expectations as transparent as possible, and be clear about where students can find answers to questions as they arise.

For ideas about integrating classroom assessments throughout your courses, see the CELT booklet 'Using Classroom Assessments to Improve Student Learning'.