Five Ideas for “Low Stakes” Assessments

What do piano scales, tennis drills and conjugating French verbs have in common?

Practice.

To get better at anything takes practice. This applies to creating balance sheets in accounting or analyzing ROI in finance, to writing polished cases in management or writing succinct essays in philosophy or history. “Low stakes assessments,” a term used by educators, provides opportunities for three elements of deep learning: practice, mistakes, and feedback.

Repetition as practice, acknowledging mistakes as errors and receiving feedback for improvement will ultimately help students retain and apply the knowledge from your teaching. Using low stakes assessments throughout the duration of the course allows students to practice skills and digest content.

Here are some ideas you can consider adopting to encourage learning:

1. Use critical thinking from real world examples.[1] Information on the web is abundant but often not verified and vetted. Having students think critically about the sources on the web is a way to evaluate and assess assumptions. For example, if a statistics class is studying the concept of margin of error, create an assignment to look at polling results of a current election. Bowen believes that teaching change and self-directed learning is education’s core value. Learning to think is critical.
2. Retrieval games: Practice is the core of learning.[2] A game show quiz format (like Jeopardy or other game shows or flash cards) have questions and answers in class. You can create scores and a leaderboard. You don’t have to have competition; you can simply create a game-like quiz. There is no shortage of electronic software (Kahoot! Polling software etc.) Bowen further adds that by encouraging difficulty, varying practice, and increasing the volume of practice, helps students retrieve the information.
3. Teach Me: This technique has students teach a topic to the other students. Some in the medical community use this technique to educate diabetic patients to make sure they understand the effects, issues, and treatments of the disease. When a patient can explain the issues to medical provider, then they know the patient understands. This teach me technique can be used for any subject – economics, history, finance, accounting etc.
4. Connect the Dots: In a chapter called “The Difficulty of Thinking for Yourself,” Bowen delves into the way the brain thinks. By developing relationships and thinking collaboratively, it points to the difficulty thinking for ourselves. Instead, make broad connections. Have students explain an opposing view. He says, “ask students how newly created data might be seen as evidence that affirms or contradicts current theories.”
5. Role-play a Jury: Even if the course is not pre-law or history, you can create a “low stakes” activity if you emulate the jury system.  (Author’s note: I have served on a jury twice and discussions about what one witness says in contrast to another is thought provoking). Here, Bowen goes through the jury process: start with an issue or concept. Poll the group first, ask students to prepare their position before they take the stand, write opening statements, have opposing statements recognized. Ask questions that make students consider both sides of an issue. Discuss the evidence. Debrief. Lastly, encourage private reflection.

The strategies above can work for any discipline, but attaining mastery may require repeated attempts. To promote mastery for quantitative courses such as statistics, finance, accounting etc., this strategy may be beneficial. Instead of a midterm plus final, instructors can create multiple exams.  Students can re-take the small exams (or different versions of the exam) multiple times in order to demonstrate mastery.[i] Carnegie Mellon’s Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence & Educational Innovation poses a strategy to offer multiple attempts. The student can take the short (1 or 2 questions or problems) until the student achieves mastery of the concept.

Pools in the Brightspace quizzing tool can help you build multiple quizzes from the Question Library. This can be done by populating lots of questions or problems. The next step is to create a quiz by extracting and randomizing the questions into small exams/quizzes. This will help the students reinforce the concepts by giving the students additional practice. Once successful, the student can proceed to take the next set of questions/problems.

While high-stakes assessments are generally weighted grades such as mid-term, projects, thesis, and final exams, these summative assessments confirm the student’s grade and progress toward your learning goals. Both summative and formative assessments are valuable, but offering frequent low stakes assessments gives students the opportunity to continually improve.

 

Bibliography and References

José Antonio Bowen, Teaching Change, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2021.

Kornhauser, Zachary G. C.; Minahan, Jillian; Siedlecki, Karen L.; Steedle, Jeffrey T. A Strategy for Increasing Student Motivation on Low-Stakes Assessments

Sambell, Kay; Hubbard, Anntain The Role of Formative ‘Low-stakes’ Assessment in Supporting Non-traditional Students' Retention and Progression in Higher Education: Student Perspectives

 

Workshops, Guidance, Help and Resources

The Learning Design Team is here to help you create test questions in your course. Please reach out to learningdesign@bentley.edu or to a specific instructional designer for ideas and help.

 

[1] Jose Antonio Bowen, Teaching Change, page 47.

[2] Ibid., page 59

[3] Ibid., page 135.

[4] Ibid., page 158-161.

[5] Carnegie Mellon Teaching Online

 

Would you like help implementing the strategies discussed above? E-mail learningdesign@bentley.edu to schedule a consultation with one of our Instructional Designers!