“BASICS” for Alignment of Teaching and Assessing Cognitive Skills Participants in this active workshop engage with a free, open source web application that is designed to familiarize instructors with criterion-based assessment, and for the development of rubrics for evaluation of student cognitive skill performance. Using the app, participants complete a series of targeted questions about alignment of cognitive skills, the content and context of an assessment, and the desired assessment criteria. The app then outputs an editable analytic rubric that can be tailored to specific needs.
Instructors at post-secondary institutions are increasingly recognizing the importance of developing cognitive skills like critical thinking, creative thinking and problem solving. To achieve this goal some instructors have moved to more student-centered curricula and looked toward performance assessments to elicit and reinforce skills development. This has led to “a new assessment culture aimed at assessing higher order thinking processes and competences” (Jonsson & Svingby, 2007, p.131). By using performance assessment, learners are motivated to demonstrate the application of skills in a meaningful way (Montgomery, 2002).
Participants will reflect on how BASICS can be used in their own context to support instructors to tailor cognitive skill assessment. Together with its associated support materials, BASICS provides a professional development opportunity, empowering instructors to engage in a process of curriculum based backward design (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005). By conclusion of this workshop it is intended that participants are able to:
- Define components of critical thinking, creative thinking and problem solving
- Describe a performance assessment as it relates to their field
- Use the BASICS rubric builder to compose a rubric for a performance task
- Utilize the principles of backward design to reflect on the alignment between the rubric and performance assessment
References Jonsson, A., & Svingby, G. (2007). The use of scoring rubrics: Reliability, validity and educational consequences.
Educational Research Review,
2(2), 130–144.
Montgomery, K. (2002). Authentic tasks and rubrics: Going beyond traditional assessments in college teaching.
College Teaching,
50(1), 34–40.
Wiggins, G. P., & McTighe, J. (2005).
Understanding by design. Ascd. Retrieved from https://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=N2EfKlyUN4QC&oi=fnd&pg=PR6&dq=understanding+by+design&ots=go7Cj7WP0s&sig=NkjhU7ncctQr5oW4hGKYxFZXNvc
