Classroom Assessment in Higher Education

Classroom assessment is the process of documenting the knowledge, skills, attitudes and beliefs of learners. It provides essential feedback to both instructors and students to improve their teaching methods for guiding and motivating students to be actively involved in their learning. Assessment drives learning. Formative assessments enable the instructor to guide the students to learn well. Summative assessments enable the measurement of levels of attainment of course outcomes and act as feedback to course design and curriculum improvement. This article presents the underlying principles of assessment through a discussion of assessment approaches and their purposes, types of assessment items, quality of assessment and summative assessment plans. Quality assessment instruments can be developed through an understanding of the quality attributes of assessment items, the process of designing assessment instruments, designing a variety of assessment items, and devising plans to evaluate them through rubrics. An approach is presented for creating a summative assessment plan that can also lead to the attainment of outcomes as per the requirements of programme accreditation.