In-Class Assessment Strategies

Posted on by dalkej
What a great turnout at last week’s (11/6/25) Teaching Matters morning coffee! Sixteen colleagues from across academic divisions and offices joined us to wrestle with the challenges–new and old–of designing and implementing effective in-class assessments. We talked through some of our  reasons for using in-class assessments, including long-term pedagogical practices and more recent AI-related concerns. In the process, colleagues shared a variety of approaches that are working in their classrooms, including:
  • Fostering student commitment by helping them understand the “why” behind assessments through conversation and clear prompt design;
  • Having students write weekly “muddy waters” cards about what’s still confusing at the end of the week, and using those to kick off the following week;
  • Using scaffolded oral assessments (e.g., debates) to encourage synthesis and/or demonstrate application of skills;
  • Holding a midterm in-class handwritten essay with required prewriting time and allowing notes to reduce retrieval anxiety and focus on analysis and drawing connections;
  • Giving short, ungraded daily quizzes to gauge understanding, develop recall, and/or promote reading accountability.
  • Doing daily in-class paragraph writing to build students’ confidence for paper-writing assignments.

Over our coffee and pastries, we also touched on the importance of articulating our learning outcomes in ways that make sense to our students. And we considered how we balance the value of information recall as a necessary and effective foundation of our assessments with the goal of developing our students’ higher-order thinking (à la Bloom’s Taxonomy).
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