assess discussion assignments

A Better Way to Assess Discussions

Nothing to "Dread"

Assessing what matters, into the spider verse, a "symbolic" grade, apps for that, next generation assessment.

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Figure 1. Graded Spider Web Discussion Rubric

A Better Way to Assess Discussions - table

Reflect & Discuss

➛ How do you currently assess your class discussions? Do your methods tend to reward volume over quality?

➛ Could a group grade for class discussions better serve your students? If so, would the grade count?

➛ How might you use Wiggins's rubric to facilitate deeper academic conversations?

1 World Economic Forum. (2016). The 10 skills you need to thrive in the fourth industrial revolution . [Blog post].

2 Wiggins, A. (2017). The best class you never taught: How spider web discussion can turn students into learning leaders . Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Alexis Wiggins has worked as a high-school English teacher, instructional coach, and consultant for curriculum and assessment. Her book, The Best Class You Never Taught: How Spider Web Discussion Can Turn Students into Learning Leaders (ASCD), helps transform classrooms through collaborative inquiry. Alexis is currently the Curriculum Coordinator at The John Cooper School in The Woodlands, TX.

ASCD is a community dedicated to educators' professional growth and well-being.

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Center for Teaching

Assessing student learning.

Forms and Purposes of Student Assessment

Assessment is more than grading, assessment plans, methods of student assessment, generative and reflective assessment, teaching guides related to student assessment, references and additional resources.

Student assessment is, arguably, the centerpiece of the teaching and learning process and therefore the subject of much discussion in the scholarship of teaching and learning. Without some method of obtaining and analyzing evidence of student learning, we can never know whether our teaching is making a difference. That is, teaching requires some process through which we can come to know whether students are developing the desired knowledge and skills, and therefore whether our instruction is effective. Learning assessment is like a magnifying glass we hold up to students’ learning to discern whether the teaching and learning process is functioning well or is in need of change.

To provide an overview of learning assessment, this teaching guide has several goals, 1) to define student learning assessment and why it is important, 2) to discuss several approaches that may help to guide and refine student assessment, 3) to address various methods of student assessment, including the test and the essay, and 4) to offer several resources for further research. In addition, you may find helfpul this five-part video series on assessment that was part of the Center for Teaching’s Online Course Design Institute.

What is student assessment and why is it Important?

In their handbook for course-based review and assessment, Martha L. A. Stassen et al. define assessment as “the systematic collection and analysis of information to improve student learning” (2001, p. 5). An intentional and thorough assessment of student learning is vital because it provides useful feedback to both instructors and students about the extent to which students are successfully meeting learning objectives. In their book Understanding by Design , Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe offer a framework for classroom instruction — “Backward Design”— that emphasizes the critical role of assessment. For Wiggins and McTighe, assessment enables instructors to determine the metrics of measurement for student understanding of and proficiency in course goals. Assessment provides the evidence needed to document and validate that meaningful learning has occurred (2005, p. 18). Their approach “encourages teachers and curriculum planners to first ‘think like an assessor’ before designing specific units and lessons, and thus to consider up front how they will determine if students have attained the desired understandings” (Wiggins and McTighe, 2005, p. 18). [1]

Not only does effective assessment provide us with valuable information to support student growth, but it also enables critically reflective teaching. Stephen Brookfield, in Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher, argues that critical reflection on one’s teaching is an essential part of developing as an educator and enhancing the learning experience of students (1995). Critical reflection on one’s teaching has a multitude of benefits for instructors, including the intentional and meaningful development of one’s teaching philosophy and practices. According to Brookfield, referencing higher education faculty, “A critically reflective teacher is much better placed to communicate to colleagues and students (as well as to herself) the rationale behind her practice. She works from a position of informed commitment” (Brookfield, 1995, p. 17). One important lens through which we may reflect on our teaching is our student evaluations and student learning assessments. This reflection allows educators to determine where their teaching has been effective in meeting learning goals and where it has not, allowing for improvements. Student assessment, then, both develop the rationale for pedagogical choices, and enables teachers to measure the effectiveness of their teaching.

The scholarship of teaching and learning discusses two general forms of assessment. The first, summative assessment , is one that is implemented at the end of the course of study, for example via comprehensive final exams or papers. Its primary purpose is to produce an evaluation that “sums up” student learning. Summative assessment is comprehensive in nature and is fundamentally concerned with learning outcomes. While summative assessment is often useful for communicating final evaluations of student achievement, it does so without providing opportunities for students to reflect on their progress, alter their learning, and demonstrate growth or improvement; nor does it allow instructors to modify their teaching strategies before student learning in a course has concluded (Maki, 2002).

The second form, formative assessment , involves the evaluation of student learning at intermediate points before any summative form. Its fundamental purpose is to help students during the learning process by enabling them to reflect on their challenges and growth so they may improve. By analyzing students’ performance through formative assessment and sharing the results with them, instructors help students to “understand their strengths and weaknesses and to reflect on how they need to improve over the course of their remaining studies” (Maki, 2002, p. 11). Pat Hutchings refers to as “assessment behind outcomes”: “the promise of assessment—mandated or otherwise—is improved student learning, and improvement requires attention not only to final results but also to how results occur. Assessment behind outcomes means looking more carefully at the process and conditions that lead to the learning we care about…” (Hutchings, 1992, p. 6, original emphasis). Formative assessment includes all manner of coursework with feedback, discussions between instructors and students, and end-of-unit examinations that provide an opportunity for students to identify important areas for necessary growth and development for themselves (Brown and Knight, 1994).

It is important to recognize that both summative and formative assessment indicate the purpose of assessment, not the method . Different methods of assessment (discussed below) can either be summative or formative depending on when and how the instructor implements them. Sally Brown and Peter Knight in Assessing Learners in Higher Education caution against a conflation of the method (e.g., an essay) with the goal (formative or summative): “Often the mistake is made of assuming that it is the method which is summative or formative, and not the purpose. This, we suggest, is a serious mistake because it turns the assessor’s attention away from the crucial issue of feedback” (1994, p. 17). If an instructor believes that a particular method is formative, but he or she does not take the requisite time or effort to provide extensive feedback to students, the assessment effectively functions as a summative assessment despite the instructor’s intentions (Brown and Knight, 1994). Indeed, feedback and discussion are critical factors that distinguish between formative and summative assessment; formative assessment is only as good as the feedback that accompanies it.

It is not uncommon to conflate assessment with grading, but this would be a mistake. Student assessment is more than just grading. Assessment links student performance to specific learning objectives in order to provide useful information to students and instructors about learning and teaching, respectively. Grading, on the other hand, according to Stassen et al. (2001) merely involves affixing a number or letter to an assignment, giving students only the most minimal indication of their performance relative to a set of criteria or to their peers: “Because grades don’t tell you about student performance on individual (or specific) learning goals or outcomes, they provide little information on the overall success of your course in helping students to attain the specific and distinct learning objectives of interest” (Stassen et al., 2001, p. 6). Grades are only the broadest of indicators of achievement or status, and as such do not provide very meaningful information about students’ learning of knowledge or skills, how they have developed, and what may yet improve. Unfortunately, despite the limited information grades provide students about their learning, grades do provide students with significant indicators of their status – their academic rank, their credits towards graduation, their post-graduation opportunities, their eligibility for grants and aid, etc. – which can distract students from the primary goal of assessment: learning. Indeed, shifting the focus of assessment away from grades and towards more meaningful understandings of intellectual growth can encourage students (as well as instructors and institutions) to attend to the primary goal of education.

Barbara Walvoord (2010) argues that assessment is more likely to be successful if there is a clear plan, whether one is assessing learning in a course or in an entire curriculum (see also Gelmon, Holland, and Spring, 2018). Without some intentional and careful plan, assessment can fall prey to unclear goals, vague criteria, limited communication of criteria or feedback, invalid or unreliable assessments, unfairness in student evaluations, or insufficient or even unmeasured learning. There are several steps in this planning process.

• Defining learning goals. An assessment plan usually begins with a clearly articulated set of learning goals.
• Defining assessment methods. Once goals are clear, an instructor must decide on what evidence – assignment(s) – will best reveal whether students are meeting the goals. We discuss several common methods below, but these need not be limited by anything but the learning goals and the teaching context.
• Developing the assessment. The next step would be to formulate clear formats, prompts, and performance criteria that ensure students can prepare effectively and provide valid, reliable evidence of their learning.
• Integrating assessment with other course elements. Then the remainder of the course design process can be completed. In both integrated (Fink 2013) and backward course design models (Wiggins & McTighe 2005), the primary assessment methods, once chosen, become the basis for other smaller reading and skill-building assignments as well as daily learning experiences such as lectures, discussions, and other activities that will prepare students for their best effort in the assessments.
• Communicate about the assessment. Once the course has begun, it is possible and necessary to communicate the assignment and its performance criteria to students. This communication may take many and preferably multiple forms to ensure student clarity and preparation, including assignment overviews in the syllabus, handouts with prompts and assessment criteria, rubrics with learning goals, model assignments (e.g., papers), in-class discussions, and collaborative decision-making about prompts or criteria, among others.
• Administer the assessment. Instructors then can implement the assessment at the appropriate time, collecting evidence of student learning – e.g., receiving papers or administering tests.
• Analyze the results. Analysis of the results can take various forms – from reading essays to computer-assisted test scoring – but always involves comparing student work to the performance criteria and the relevant scholarly research from the field(s).
• Communicate the results. Instructors then compose an assessment complete with areas of strength and improvement, and communicate it to students along with grades (if the assignment is graded), hopefully within a reasonable time frame. This also is the time to determine whether the assessment was valid and reliable, and if not, how to communicate this to students and adjust feedback and grades fairly. For instance, were the test or essay questions confusing, yielding invalid and unreliable assessments of student knowledge.
• Reflect and revise. Once the assessment is complete, instructors and students can develop learning plans for the remainder of the course so as to ensure improvements, and the assignment may be changed for future courses, as necessary.

Let’s see how this might work in practice through an example. An instructor in a Political Science course on American Environmental Policy may have a learning goal (among others) of students understanding the historical precursors of various environmental policies and how these both enabled and constrained the resulting legislation and its impacts on environmental conservation and health. The instructor therefore decides that the course will be organized around a series of short papers that will combine to make a thorough policy report, one that will also be the subject of student presentations and discussions in the last third of the course. Each student will write about an American environmental policy of their choice, with a first paper addressing its historical precursors, a second focused on the process of policy formation, and a third analyzing the extent of its impacts on environmental conservation or health. This will help students to meet the content knowledge goals of the course, in addition to its goals of improving students’ research, writing, and oral presentation skills. The instructor then develops the prompts, guidelines, and performance criteria that will be used to assess student skills, in addition to other course elements to best prepare them for this work – e.g., scaffolded units with quizzes, readings, lectures, debates, and other activities. Once the course has begun, the instructor communicates with the students about the learning goals, the assignments, and the criteria used to assess them, giving them the necessary context (goals, assessment plan) in the syllabus, handouts on the policy papers, rubrics with assessment criteria, model papers (if possible), and discussions with them as they need to prepare. The instructor then collects the papers at the appropriate due dates, assesses their conceptual and writing quality against the criteria and field’s scholarship, and then provides written feedback and grades in a manner that is reasonably prompt and sufficiently thorough for students to make improvements. Then the instructor can make determinations about whether the assessment method was effective and what changes might be necessary.

Assessment can vary widely from informal checks on understanding, to quizzes, to blogs, to essays, and to elaborate performance tasks such as written or audiovisual projects (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005). Below are a few common methods of assessment identified by Brown and Knight (1994) that are important to consider.

According to Euan S. Henderson, essays make two important contributions to learning and assessment: the development of skills and the cultivation of a learning style (1980). The American Association of Colleges & Universities (AAC&U) also has found that intensive writing is a “high impact” teaching practice likely to help students in their engagement, learning, and academic attainment (Kuh 2008).

Things to Keep in Mind about Essays

• Essays are a common form of writing assignment in courses and can be either a summative or formative form of assessment depending on how the instructor utilizes them.
• Essays encompass a wide array of narrative forms and lengths, from short descriptive essays to long analytical or creative ones. Shorter essays are often best suited to assess student’s understanding of threshold concepts and discrete analytical or writing skills, while longer essays afford assessments of higher order concepts and more complex learning goals, such as rigorous analysis, synthetic writing, problem solving, or creative tasks.
• A common challenge of the essay is that students can use them simply to regurgitate rather than analyze and synthesize information to make arguments. Students need performance criteria and prompts that urge them to go beyond mere memorization and comprehension, but encourage the highest levels of learning on Bloom’s Taxonomy . This may open the possibility for essay assignments that go beyond the common summary or descriptive essay on a given topic, but demand, for example, narrative or persuasive essays or more creative projects.
• Instructors commonly assume that students know how to write essays and can encounter disappointment or frustration when they discover that this is sometimes not the case. For this reason, it is important for instructors to make their expectations clear and be prepared to assist, or provide students to resources that will enhance their writing skills. Faculty may also encourage students to attend writing workshops at university writing centers, such as Vanderbilt University’s Writing Studio .

Exams and time-constrained, individual assessment

Examinations have traditionally been a gold standard of assessment, particularly in post-secondary education. Many educators prefer them because they can be highly effective, they can be standardized, they are easily integrated into disciplines with certification standards, and they are efficient to implement since they can allow for less labor-intensive feedback and grading. They can involve multiple forms of questions, be of varying lengths, and can be used to assess multiple levels of student learning. Like essays they can be summative or formative forms of assessment.

Things to Keep in Mind about Exams

• Exams typically focus on the assessment of students’ knowledge of facts, figures, and other discrete information crucial to a course. While they can involve questioning that demands students to engage in higher order demonstrations of comprehension, problem solving, analysis, synthesis, critique, and even creativity, such exams often require more time to prepare and validate.
• Exam questions can be multiple choice, true/false, or other discrete answer formats, or they can be essay or problem-solving. For more on how to write good multiple choice questions, see this guide .
• Exams can make significant demands on students’ factual knowledge and therefore can have the side-effect of encouraging cramming and surface learning. Further, when exams are offered infrequently, or when they have high stakes by virtue of their heavy weighting in course grade schemes or in student goals, they may accompany violations of academic integrity.
• In the process of designing an exam, instructors should consider the following questions. What are the learning objectives that the exam seeks to evaluate? Have students been adequately prepared to meet exam expectations? What are the skills and abilities that students need to do well on the exam? How will this exam be utilized to enhance the student learning process?

Self-Assessment

The goal of implementing self-assessment in a course is to enable students to develop their own judgment and the capacities for critical meta-cognition – to learn how to learn. In self-assessment students are expected to assess both the processes and products of their learning. While the assessment of the product is often the task of the instructor, implementing student self-assessment in the classroom ensures students evaluate their performance and the process of learning that led to it. Self-assessment thus provides a sense of student ownership of their learning and can lead to greater investment and engagement. It also enables students to develop transferable skills in other areas of learning that involve group projects and teamwork, critical thinking and problem-solving, as well as leadership roles in the teaching and learning process with their peers.

Things to Keep in Mind about Self-Assessment

• Self-assessment is not self-grading. According to Brown and Knight, “Self-assessment involves the use of evaluative processes in which judgement is involved, where self-grading is the marking of one’s own work against a set of criteria and potential outcomes provided by a third person, usually the [instructor]” (1994, p. 52). Self-assessment can involve self-grading, but instructors of record retain the final authority to determine and assign grades.
• To accurately and thoroughly self-assess, students require clear learning goals for the assignment in question, as well as rubrics that clarify different performance criteria and levels of achievement for each. These rubrics may be instructor-designed, or they may be fashioned through a collaborative dialogue with students. Rubrics need not include any grade assignation, but merely descriptive academic standards for different criteria.
• Students may not have the expertise to assess themselves thoroughly, so it is helpful to build students’ capacities for self-evaluation, and it is important that they always be supplemented with faculty assessments.
• Students may initially resist instructor attempts to involve themselves in the assessment process. This is usually due to insecurities or lack of confidence in their ability to objectively evaluate their own work, or possibly because of habituation to more passive roles in the learning process. Brown and Knight note, however, that when students are asked to evaluate their work, frequently student-determined outcomes are very similar to those of instructors, particularly when the criteria and expectations have been made explicit in advance (1994).
• Methods of self-assessment vary widely and can be as unique as the instructor or the course. Common forms of self-assessment involve written or oral reflection on a student’s own work, including portfolio, logs, instructor-student interviews, learner diaries and dialog journals, post-test reflections, and the like.

Peer Assessment

Peer assessment is a type of collaborative learning technique where students evaluate the work of their peers and, in return, have their own work evaluated as well. This dimension of assessment is significantly grounded in theoretical approaches to active learning and adult learning . Like self-assessment, peer assessment gives learners ownership of learning and focuses on the process of learning as students are able to “share with one another the experiences that they have undertaken” (Brown and Knight, 1994, p. 52).  However, it also provides students with other models of performance (e.g., different styles or narrative forms of writing), as well as the opportunity to teach, which can enable greater preparation, reflection, and meta-cognitive organization.

Things to Keep in Mind about Peer Assessment

• Similar to self-assessment, students benefit from clear and specific learning goals and rubrics. Again, these may be instructor-defined or determined through collaborative dialogue.
• Also similar to self-assessment, it is important to not conflate peer assessment and peer grading, since grading authority is retained by the instructor of record.
• While student peer assessments are most often fair and accurate, they sometimes can be subject to bias. In competitive educational contexts, for example when students are graded normatively (“on a curve”), students can be biased or potentially game their peer assessments, giving their fellow students unmerited low evaluations. Conversely, in more cooperative teaching environments or in cases when they are friends with their peers, students may provide overly favorable evaluations. Also, other biases associated with identity (e.g., race, gender, or class) and personality differences can shape student assessments in unfair ways. Therefore, it is important for instructors to encourage fairness, to establish processes based on clear evidence and identifiable criteria, and to provide instructor assessments as accompaniments or correctives to peer evaluations.
• Students may not have the disciplinary expertise or assessment experience of the instructor, and therefore can issue unsophisticated judgments of their peers. Therefore, to avoid unfairness, inaccuracy, and limited comments, formative peer assessments may need to be supplemented with instructor feedback.

As Brown and Knight assert, utilizing multiple methods of assessment, including more than one assessor when possible, improves the reliability of the assessment data. It also ensures that students with diverse aptitudes and abilities can be assessed accurately and have equal opportunities to excel. However, a primary challenge to the multiple methods approach is how to weigh the scores produced by multiple methods of assessment. When particular methods produce higher range of marks than others, instructors can potentially misinterpret and mis-evaluate student learning. Ultimately, they caution that, when multiple methods produce different messages about the same student, instructors should be mindful that the methods are likely assessing different forms of achievement (Brown and Knight, 1994).

These are only a few of the many forms of assessment that one might use to evaluate and enhance student learning (see also ideas present in Brown and Knight, 1994). To this list of assessment forms and methods we may add many more that encourage students to produce anything from research papers to films, theatrical productions to travel logs, op-eds to photo essays, manifestos to short stories. The limits of what may be assigned as a form of assessment is as varied as the subjects and skills we seek to empower in our students. Vanderbilt’s Center for Teaching has an ever-expanding array of guides on creative models of assessment that are present below, so please visit them to learn more about other assessment innovations and subjects.

Whatever plan and method you use, assessment often begins with an intentional clarification of the values that drive it. While many in higher education may argue that values do not have a role in assessment, we contend that values (for example, rigor) always motivate and shape even the most objective of learning assessments. Therefore, as in other aspects of assessment planning, it is helpful to be intentional and critically reflective about what values animate your teaching and the learning assessments it requires. There are many values that may direct learning assessment, but common ones include rigor, generativity, practicability, co-creativity, and full participation (Bandy et al., 2018). What do these characteristics mean in practice?

Rigor. In the context of learning assessment, rigor means aligning our methods with the goals we have for students, principles of validity and reliability, ethics of fairness and doing no harm, critical examinations of the meaning we make from the results, and good faith efforts to improve teaching and learning. In short, rigor suggests understanding learning assessment as we would any other form of intentional, thoroughgoing, critical, and ethical inquiry.

Generativity. Learning assessments may be most effective when they create conditions for the emergence of new knowledge and practice, including student learning and skill development, as well as instructor pedagogy and teaching methods. Generativity opens up rather than closes down possibilities for discovery, reflection, growth, and transformation.

Practicability. Practicability recommends that learning assessment be grounded in the realities of the world as it is, fitting within the boundaries of both instructor’s and students’ time and labor. While this may, at times, advise a method of learning assessment that seems to conflict with the other values, we believe that assessment fails to be rigorous, generative, participatory, or co-creative if it is not feasible and manageable for instructors and students.

Full Participation. Assessments should be equally accessible to, and encouraging of, learning for all students, empowering all to thrive regardless of identity or background. This requires multiple and varied methods of assessment that are inclusive of diverse identities – racial, ethnic, national, linguistic, gendered, sexual, class, etcetera – and their varied perspectives, skills, and cultures of learning.

Co-creation. As alluded to above regarding self- and peer-assessment, co-creative approaches empower students to become subjects of, not just objects of, learning assessment. That is, learning assessments may be more effective and generative when assessment is done with, not just for or to, students. This is consistent with feminist, social, and community engagement pedagogies, in which values of co-creation encourage us to critically interrogate and break down hierarchies between knowledge producers (traditionally, instructors) and consumers (traditionally, students) (e.g., Saltmarsh, Hartley, & Clayton, 2009, p. 10; Weimer, 2013). In co-creative approaches, students’ involvement enhances the meaningfulness, engagement, motivation, and meta-cognitive reflection of assessments, yielding greater learning (Bass & Elmendorf, 2019). The principle of students being co-creators of their own education is what motivates the course design and professional development work Vanderbilt University’s Center for Teaching has organized around the Students as Producers theme.

Below is a list of other CFT teaching guides that supplement this one and may be of assistance as you consider all of the factors that shape your assessment plan.

• Active Learning
• An Introduction to Lecturing
• Beyond the Essay: Making Student Thinking Visible in the Humanities
• Bloom’s Taxonomy
• Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs)
• Classroom Response Systems
• How People Learn
• Service-Learning and Community Engagement
• Syllabus Construction
• Teaching with Blogs
• Test-Enhanced Learning
• Assessing Student Learning (a five-part video series for the CFT’s Online Course Design Institute)

Angelo, Thomas A., and K. Patricia Cross. Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers . 2 nd edition. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1993. Print.

Bandy, Joe, Mary Price, Patti Clayton, Julia Metzker, Georgia Nigro, Sarah Stanlick, Stephani Etheridge Woodson, Anna Bartel, & Sylvia Gale. Democratically engaged assessment: Reimagining the purposes and practices of assessment in community engagement . Davis, CA: Imagining America, 2018. Web.

Bass, Randy and Heidi Elmendorf. 2019. “ Designing for Difficulty: Social Pedagogies as a Framework for Course Design .” Social Pedagogies: Teagle Foundation White Paper. Georgetown University, 2019. Web.

Brookfield, Stephen D. Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher . San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995. Print

Brown, Sally, and Peter Knight. Assessing Learners in Higher Education . 1 edition. London ;Philadelphia: Routledge, 1998. Print.

Cameron, Jeanne et al. “Assessment as Critical Praxis: A Community College Experience.” Teaching Sociology 30.4 (2002): 414–429. JSTOR . Web.

Fink, L. Dee. Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses. Second Edition. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2013. Print.

Gibbs, Graham and Claire Simpson. “Conditions under which Assessment Supports Student Learning. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education 1 (2004): 3-31. Print.

Henderson, Euan S. “The Essay in Continuous Assessment.” Studies in Higher Education 5.2 (1980): 197–203. Taylor and Francis+NEJM . Web.

Gelmon, Sherril B., Barbara Holland, and Amy Spring. Assessing Service-Learning and Civic Engagement: Principles and Techniques. Second Edition . Stylus, 2018. Print.

Kuh, George. High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter , American Association of Colleges & Universities, 2008. Web.

Maki, Peggy L. “Developing an Assessment Plan to Learn about Student Learning.” The Journal of Academic Librarianship 28.1 (2002): 8–13. ScienceDirect . Web. The Journal of Academic Librarianship. Print.

Sharkey, Stephen, and William S. Johnson. Assessing Undergraduate Learning in Sociology . ASA Teaching Resource Center, 1992. Print.

Walvoord, Barbara. Assessment Clear and Simple: A Practical Guide for Institutions, Departments, and General Education. Second Edition . San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2010. Print.

Weimer, Maryellen. Learner-Centered Teaching: Five Key Changes to Practice. Second Edition . San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2013. Print.

Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding By Design . 2nd Expanded edition. Alexandria,

VA: Assn. for Supervision & Curriculum Development, 2005. Print.

[1] For more on Wiggins and McTighe’s “Backward Design” model, see our teaching guide here .

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Assessing Student Learning: 6 Types of Assessment and How to Use Them

Assessing student learning is a critical component of effective teaching and plays a significant role in fostering academic success. We will explore six different types of assessment and evaluation strategies that can help K-12 educators, school administrators, and educational organizations enhance both student learning experiences and teacher well-being.

We will provide practical guidance on how to implement and utilize various assessment methods, such as formative and summative assessments, diagnostic assessments, performance-based assessments, self-assessments, and peer assessments.

Additionally, we will also discuss the importance of implementing standard-based assessments and offer tips for choosing the right assessment strategy for your specific needs.

Importance of Assessing Student Learning

Assessment plays a crucial role in education, as it allows educators to measure students’ understanding, track their progress, and identify areas where intervention may be necessary. Assessing student learning not only helps educators make informed decisions about instruction but also contributes to student success and teacher well-being.

Assessments provide insight into student knowledge, skills, and progress while also highlighting necessary adjustments in instruction. Effective assessment practices ultimately contribute to better educational outcomes and promote a culture of continuous improvement within schools and classrooms.

1. Formative assessment

Formative assessment is a type of assessment that focuses on monitoring student learning during the instructional process. Its primary purpose is to provide ongoing feedback to both teachers and students, helping them identify areas of strength and areas in need of improvement. This type of assessment is typically low-stakes and does not contribute to a student’s final grade.

Some common examples of formative assessments include quizzes, class discussions, exit tickets, and think-pair-share activities. This type of assessment allows educators to track student understanding throughout the instructional period and identify gaps in learning and intervention opportunities.

To effectively use formative assessments in the classroom, teachers should implement them regularly and provide timely feedback to students.

This feedback should be specific and actionable, helping students understand what they need to do to improve their performance. Teachers should use the information gathered from formative assessments to refine their instructional strategies and address any misconceptions or gaps in understanding. Formative assessments play a crucial role in supporting student learning and helping educators make informed decisions about their instructional practices.

Check Out Our Online Course: Standards-Based Grading: How to Implement a Meaningful Grading System that Improves Student Success

2. summative assessment.

Examples of summative assessments include final exams, end-of-unit tests, standardized tests, and research papers. To effectively use summative assessments in the classroom, it’s important to ensure that they are aligned with the learning objectives and content covered during instruction.

This will help to provide an accurate representation of a student’s understanding and mastery of the material. Providing students with clear expectations and guidelines for the assessment can help reduce anxiety and promote optimal performance.

Summative assessments should be used in conjunction with other assessment types, such as formative assessments, to provide a comprehensive evaluation of student learning and growth.

3. Diagnostic assessment

Diagnostic assessment, often used at the beginning of a new unit or term, helps educators identify students’ prior knowledge, skills, and understanding of a particular topic.

This type of assessment enables teachers to tailor their instruction to meet the specific needs and learning gaps of their students. Examples of diagnostic assessments include pre-tests, entry tickets, and concept maps.

To effectively use diagnostic assessments in the classroom, teachers should analyze the results to identify patterns and trends in student understanding.

This information can be used to create differentiated instruction plans and targeted interventions for students struggling with the upcoming material. Sharing the results with students can help them understand their strengths and areas for improvement, fostering a growth mindset and encouraging active engagement in their learning.

4. Performance-based assessment

Performance-based assessment is a type of evaluation that requires students to demonstrate their knowledge, skills, and abilities through the completion of real-world tasks or activities.

The main purpose of this assessment is to assess students’ ability to apply their learning in authentic, meaningful situations that closely resemble real-life challenges. Examples of performance-based assessments include projects, presentations, portfolios, and hands-on experiments.

These assessments allow students to showcase their understanding and application of concepts in a more active and engaging manner compared to traditional paper-and-pencil tests.

To effectively use performance-based assessments in the classroom, educators should clearly define the task requirements and assessment criteria, providing students with guidelines and expectations for their work. Teachers should also offer support and feedback throughout the process, allowing students to revise and improve their performance.

Incorporating opportunities for peer feedback and self-reflection can further enhance the learning process and help students develop essential skills such as collaboration, communication, and critical thinking.

5. Self-assessment

Self-assessment is a valuable tool for encouraging students to engage in reflection and take ownership of their learning. This type of assessment requires students to evaluate their own progress, skills, and understanding of the subject matter. By promoting self-awareness and critical thinking, self-assessment can contribute to the development of lifelong learning habits and foster a growth mindset.

Examples of self-assessment activities include reflective journaling, goal setting, self-rating scales, or checklists. These tools provide students with opportunities to assess their strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement. When implementing self-assessment in the classroom, it is important to create a supportive environment where students feel comfortable and encouraged to be honest about their performance.

Teachers can guide students by providing clear criteria and expectations for self-assessment, as well as offering constructive feedback to help them set realistic goals for future learning.

Incorporating self-assessment as part of a broader assessment strategy can reinforce learning objectives and empower students to take an active role in their education.

Reflecting on their performance and understanding the assessment criteria can help them recognize both short-term successes and long-term goals. This ongoing process of self-evaluation can help students develop a deeper understanding of the material, as well as cultivate valuable skills such as self-regulation, goal setting, and critical thinking.

6. Peer assessment

Peer assessment, also known as peer evaluation, is a strategy where students evaluate and provide feedback on their classmates’ work. This type of assessment allows students to gain a better understanding of their own work, as well as that of their peers.

Examples of peer assessment activities include group projects, presentations, written assignments, or online discussion boards.

In these settings, students can provide constructive feedback on their peers’ work, identify strengths and areas for improvement, and suggest specific strategies for enhancing performance.

Constructive peer feedback can help students gain a deeper understanding of the material and develop valuable skills such as working in groups, communicating effectively, and giving constructive criticism.

To successfully integrate peer assessment in the classroom, consider incorporating a variety of activities that allow students to practice evaluating their peers’ work, while also receiving feedback on their own performance.

Encourage students to focus on both strengths and areas for improvement, and emphasize the importance of respectful, constructive feedback. Provide opportunities for students to reflect on the feedback they receive and incorporate it into their learning process. Monitor the peer assessment process to ensure fairness, consistency, and alignment with learning objectives.

Implementing Standard-Based Assessments

Standard-based assessments are designed to measure students’ performance relative to established learning standards, such as those generated by the Common Core State Standards Initiative or individual state education guidelines.

By implementing these types of assessments, educators can ensure that students meet the necessary benchmarks for their grade level and subject area, providing a clearer picture of student progress and learning outcomes.

To successfully implement standard-based assessments, it is essential to align assessment tasks with the relevant learning standards.

This involves creating assessments that directly measure students’ knowledge and skills in relation to the standards rather than relying solely on traditional testing methods.

As a result, educators can obtain a more accurate understanding of student performance and identify areas that may require additional support or instruction. Grading formative and summative assessments within a standard-based framework requires a shift in focus from assigning letter grades or percentages to evaluating students’ mastery of specific learning objectives.

This approach encourages educators to provide targeted feedback that addresses individual student needs and promotes growth and improvement. By utilizing rubrics or other assessment tools, teachers can offer clear, objective criteria for evaluating student work, ensuring consistency and fairness in the grading process.

Tips For Choosing the Right Assessment Strategy

When selecting an assessment strategy, it’s crucial to consider its purpose. Ask yourself what you want to accomplish with the assessment and how it will contribute to student learning. This will help you determine the most appropriate assessment type for your specific situation.

Aligning assessments with learning objectives is another critical factor. Ensure that the assessment methods you choose accurately measure whether students have met the desired learning outcomes. This alignment will provide valuable feedback to both you and your students on their progress. Diversifying assessment methods is essential for a comprehensive evaluation of student learning.

By using a variety of assessment types, you can gain a more accurate understanding of students’ strengths and weaknesses. This approach also helps support different learning styles and reduces the risk of overemphasis on a single assessment method.

Incorporating multiple forms of assessment, such as formative, summative, diagnostic, performance-based, self-assessment, and peer assessment, can provide a well-rounded understanding of student learning. By doing so, educators can make informed decisions about instruction, support, and intervention strategies to enhance student success and overall classroom experience.

Challenges and Solutions in Assessment Implementation

Implementing various assessment strategies can present several challenges for educators. One common challenge is the limited time and resources available for creating and administering assessments. To address this issue, teachers can collaborate with colleagues to share resources, divide the workload, and discuss best practices.

Utilizing technology and online platforms can also streamline the assessment process and save time. Another challenge is ensuring that assessments are unbiased and inclusive.

To overcome this, educators should carefully review assessment materials for potential biases and design assessments that are accessible to all students, regardless of their cultural backgrounds or learning abilities.

Offering flexible assessment options for the varying needs of learners can create a more equitable and inclusive learning environment. It is essential to continually improve assessment practices and seek professional development opportunities.

Seeking support from colleagues, attending workshops and conferences related to assessment practices, or enrolling in online courses can help educators stay up-to-date on best practices while also providing opportunities for networking with other professionals.

Ultimately, these efforts will contribute to an improved understanding of the assessments used as well as their relevance in overall student learning.

Assessing student learning is a crucial component of effective teaching and should not be overlooked. By understanding and implementing the various types of assessments discussed in this article, you can create a more comprehensive and effective approach to evaluating student learning in your classroom.

Remember to consider the purpose of each assessment, align them with your learning objectives, and diversify your methods for a well-rounded evaluation of student progress.

If you’re looking to further enhance your assessment practices and overall professional development, Strobel Education offers workshops , courses , keynotes , and coaching  services tailored for K-12 educators. With a focus on fostering a positive school climate and enhancing student learning,  Strobel Education can support your journey toward improved assessment implementation and greater teacher well-being.

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Learning Through Discussion 

Discussions can be meaningful and engaging learning experiences: dynamic, eye-opening, and generative. However, like any class activity, they require planning and preparation. Without that, discussion challenges can arise in the form of unequal participation, unclear learning outcomes, or low engagement. This resource presents key considerations in class discussions and offers strategies for how instructors can prepare and engage in effective classroom discussions.

On this page:

• The What and Why of Class Discussion

Identifying your Course Context

• Plan for Classroom Discussion
• Warm up Classroom Discussion
• Engage in Classroom Discussion
• Wrap up Classroom Discussion

Leveraging Asynchronous Discussion Spaces

• References and Further Reading

The CTL is here to help!

Seeking additional support with discussion pedagogy? Email [email protected] to schedule a 1-1 consultation. For support with any of the Columbia tools discussed below, email [email protected] or join our virtual office hours .

Interested in inviting the CTL to facilitate a session on this topic for your school, department, or program? Visit our Workshops To Go page for more information.

Cite this resource: Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning (2021). Learning Through. DIscussion. Columbia University. Retrieved [today’s date] from https://ctl.columbia.edu/resources-and-technology/resources/learning-through-discussion/

The What and Why of Class Discussion 

Class discussion can take many forms, from structured prompts and assignments to more casual or informal conversations. Regardless of class context (e.g.: a seminar, large lecture, or lab course) or the form (e.g.: in-person or asynchronous) discussion takes, it offers a number of benefits to students’ learning. As an active learning technique, class discussion requires students to be co-constructors of their learning. Research shows that students learn more when they actively participate in their learning, rather than passively listen. Furthermore, studies have also shown that “student participation, encouragement, and peer-to-peer interaction was consistently and positively related to the development of critical thinking skills” (Howard, 2015, pp. 6). Class discussion has also been linked to greater student motivation, improved communication skills, and higher grades (Howard, 2015). But just like effective lectures or assignments require planning and preparation, so too does class discussion. 

The following sections offer a framework and strategies for learning through discussion. These strategies are organized around four key phases: planning for classroom discussion, warming up for classroom discussion, engaging in classroom discussion, and wrapping up classroom discussion.

While the strategies and considerations provided throughout this resource are adaptable across course contexts, it is important to recognize instructors’ varied course formats, and how discussion might differ across them. This section identifies a few of these contexts, and reviews  how these contexts might shape instructors’ engagement with both this resource and class discussion more broadly. 

I teach a discussion-based course

Small classes and seminars use discussion-based pedagogies, though it can be challenging to get every student to contribute to discussions. It is important to create multiple opportunities for engagement and not just rely on whole group discussion. Pair and small group discussions can create trust among students and give them the confidence to speak up in the larger group. Instructors of discussion-based courses can extend in-class discussions into the asynchronous space. These inclusive moves allow students to contribute to discussions in multiple ways.

I do not teach a discussion-based course

Whether teaching a large lecture course, a lab course, or other non-discussion based course, students will still benefit from interacting with each other and learning through discussion. Small group or pair discussion can be less intimidating for students regardless of class size and help create a sense of community that impacts learning.

I teach a course that may have some Hybrid/HyFlex meetings.

In-person classes might sometimes offer hybrid or HyFlex opportunities for students to accommodate extenuating circumstances. In a hybrid/HyFlex course session, students participating in-person and remotely should have equal opportunities to contribute to discussions. To make this a reality, advanced preparation involves thinking through the logistics using discussion activities, roles and responsibilities (if working with TA(s)), classroom technologies (e.g., ceiling microphones available in the classroom; asking in-person students to bring a mobile device and headset if possible to engage with their remote peers), and determining the configurations if using discussion groups or paired work (both in a socially distanced classroom, and if asking both in-person and remote students to discuss together in breakout groups).

Planning for Classroom Discussion

Regardless of your course context, there are some general considerations for planning a class discussion; these considerations include: the goals and expectations, the modality of discussion, and the questions you might use to prompt discussion. The following section offers some questions for reflection, alongside ideas and strategies to address these considerations.

Goals & Expectations

What is the goal of the discussion? How will it support student learning? What are your expectations of student participation and contributions to the discussion? How will you communicate the goals and expectations to students?

Articulate the goals of discussion : Consider both the content you want your students to learn and the skills you want them to apply and develop. These goals will inform the learner-centered strategies and digital tools you use during discussion.

Communicate the purpose (not just the topic) of discussion: Sharing learning goals will help students understand why discussion is being used and how it will contribute to their learning. 

Specify what you expect of student contributions to the discussion and how they will be assessed: Be explicit about what students should include in their contributions to make them substantive, and model possible ways of responding. Guide students in how they can contribute substantively to their peers’ live responses or online posts. You might consider asking students to use the 3CQ model: 

• Compliment—I like that ___ because…; 
• Comment—I agree/disagree with (specific point/idea) because…; 
• Connection—I also thought that…; 
• Question—I wonder why…  

Establish discussion guidelines: Communicate expectations for class discussion.  Be sure to include desired behaviors/etiquette and how technologies and tools for discussion will be used. Students in all classes can benefit from discussion guidelines as they help to clearly identify and establish expectations for student success. For more support with getting started, see the Barnard Center for Engaged Pedagogy’s resource on Crafting Community Agreements . Additionally, while there are some shared general discussion guidelines, there are also some specific considerations for asynchronous discussions: 

Sample Discussion Guidelines:

• Refer to classmates by name.
• Allow everyone the chance to speak (“Take Space, Make Space”).
• Constructively critique ideas, not individuals.
• Listen actively without interrupting. 
• Contribute questions, ideas, or resources.

Sample Asynchronous Discussion Guidelines:

• Respond to discussion posts within # of hours or days.
• Review one’s own writing for clarity before posting, being mindful of how it may be interpreted by others.
• Prioritize building upon or challenging the strongest ideas presented in a post instead of only focusing on the weakest aspects. 
• Acknowledge something someone else said. 
• Build on their comment by connecting with course content, adding an example or observation.
• Conclude with critical thinking or socratic questions. 

Invite students to revise, contribute to, or co-create the guidelines. One way to do this is to facilitate a discussion about discussions, asking students to identify what the characteristics of an effective discussion are. This will encourage their ownership of the guidelines. Post the guidelines in CourseWorks and refer to them as needed.

In what modality/modalities will the discussion take place (in-person/live, asynchronous, or a blend of both)?

The modality of your class discussion may determine the tools and technologies that you ask students to engage with. Thus, it is important to determine early on how you would like students to engage in discussion and what tools you will use to support their engagement. Consider leveraging your asynchronous course spaces (e.g., CourseWorks), which can help students both prepare for an in-class discussion, as well expand upon and continue in-class discussions. For support with setting up asynchronous discussions, see the Leveraging Asynchronous Discussion Spaces section below.

What prompts will be used for discussion? Who will come up with those prompts (e.g.: instructor, TA, or students)?

The questions you ask and how you ask them are important for leading an effective discussion. Discussion questions do not have to be instructor-generated; asking students to generate discussion prompts is a great way to engage them in their learning. 

Draft open-ended questions that advance student learning and inspire a range of answers (avoiding closed-ended, vague, or leading questions). Vary question complexity over the course of a discussion. If there’s one right answer, ask students about their process to get to the right answer. 

The following table features sample questions that increase in cognitive complexity and is based on the six categories of the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy.

Warming up for Classroom Discussion 

Get students comfortable talking with their peers, you, and the TA(s) (as applicable) from the start of the course. Create opportunities for students to have pair or small group conversations to get to know one another and connect as a community. Regardless of your class size or context (i.e.: seminars, large-lecture classes, labs), for discussions to become a norm in your course, you will need to build community early on in the course.

Get students talking early and often to foster community

How will you make peer-to-peer engagement an integral part of your class? How can you get students talking to each other?

To encourage student participation and peer-to-peer interaction, create early and frequent opportunities for students to share and talk with each other. These opportunities can help make students more comfortable with participating in discussion, as well as help build rapport and foster trust amongst class members. Icebreakers and small group discussion opportunities provide great ways to get students talking, especially in large-enrollment classes where students may feel less connection with their peers (see sample icebreakers below ).  For additional support with building community in your course, see the CTL’s Community Building in Online and Hybrid (HyFlex) Courses resource. (Although this resource emphasizes online and hybrid/HyFlex modalities, the strategies provided are applicable across all course modalities.)

Establish class norms around discussion and participation

How can you communicate class norms around discussion and participation on day one? 

The first class meeting is an opportunity to warm students up to class discussion and participation from the outset. Rather than letting norms of passivity establish over the first couple of weeks, you can use the first class meeting to signal to students they will be expected to participate or interact with their peers regularly. You might ask students to do a welcoming icebreaker on the first day, or you might invite questions and syllabus discussion. No matter the activity, establishing a norm around discussion and participation at the outset will help warm students up to participating and contributing to later discussions; these norms can also be further supported by your discussion guidelines . Icebreakers:  Icebreakers are a great way to establish a positive course climate and encourage student-student, as well as instructor-student, interactions. Some ideas for icebreaker activities related to discussion include:

• (Meta)Discussion about Discussions: In small groups during class, or using a CourseWorks discussion board , students introduce themselves to each other, and share their thoughts on what are the qualities of good and bad discussions.
• Course Content: Ask students to share their thoughts about a big question that the course addresses or ask students what comes to mind when they think of an important course concept. You could even ask students to scan the syllabus and share about a particular topic or reading they are most excited about.

Engaging in Classroom Discussion

With all of your preparation and planning complete, there are some important considerations you will need to make with both your students and yourself in mind. This section offers some strategies for engaging in classroom discussion.

Involve students in discussion 

How will you engage all of your students in the discussion? How will you make discussion and your expectations about student participation explicit and integral to the class?

Involving your students in class discussion will allow for more student voices and perspectives to be contributed to the conversation. You might consider leveraging the time before and after class or office hours to have informal conversations and build rapport with students. Additionally, having students rotate roles and responsibilities can keep them focused and engaged.

Student roles: Engage all students by asking them to volunteer for and rotate through roles such as facilitator, summarizer, challenger, etc. In large-enrollment courses, these roles can be assigned in small group or pair discussions. For an asynchronous discussion, roles might include: discussion starter / original poster, connector to research, connector to theory. Additional roles might include: timekeeper, notetaker, discussion starter, wrapper, and student  monitor:

• Discussion starter / original poster: Involve students in initiating the discussion. Designate 2–3 students per discussion to spark the conversation with a question, quotation, an example, or link to previous course content.
• Discussion wrapper: Engage students in facilitating the discussion. Help students grasp take-aways. Designate 2-3 students per discussion to wrap up the discussion by identifying themes, extracting key ideas, or listing questions to explore further. 
• Student monitor: Ask a student (on a rotating basis) or TA(s) if applicable, to monitor the Zoom chat (in hybrid/HyFlex courses) or the CourseWorks Discussion Boards (when leveraging asynchronous discussion spaces). The monitors can then flag important points for the class or read off the questions that are being posed. 

Student-generated questions: Prepare students for discussion and involve them in asking and answering peer questions about the topic. Invite students to post questions to a CourseWorks Discussion before class, or share their questions during the discussion. If students are expected to respond to their peer’s questions, they need to be told and guided how to do so. Highlight and use insightful student questions to prime or further the discussion.

Student-led presentations: In smaller seminar-style classes or labs, invite students to give informal presentations. You might ask them to share examples that relate to the topic or concept being discussed, or respond to a targeted prompt.

Determine your role in discussion 

How will you facilitate discussion? What will your presence be in asynchronous discussion spaces? What can students expect of your role in the discussion? 

Make your role (or that of your co-instructor(s) and/or TA(s)) in the discussion explicit so that students know what to expect of your presence, reinforcement of the discussion guidelines, and receipt of feedback. 

Actively guide the discussion to make it easy for students to do most of the talking and/or posting. This includes being present, modeling contributions, asking questions, using students’ names, giving timely feedback, affirming student contributions, and making inclusive moves such as including as many voices and perspectives and addressing issues that may arise during a conversation. 

• For in-class discussions , additional strategies include actively listening, giving students time to think before responding, repeating questions, and warm calling. (Unlike cold calling, warm calling is when students do pre-work and are told in advance that they will be asked to share their or their group’s response. This technique can minimize student anxiety, as well as produce higher quality responses.)
• For asynchronous discussions , additional strategies include having parallel discussions in small groups on CourseWorks, and inviting students to post videos, audio clips, or images such as drawings, maps, charts, etc.

Manage the discussion and intervene when necessary : Manage dynamics, recognizing that your classroom is influenced by societal norms and expectations that may be inherently inequitable. Moderate the ongoing discussion to make sure all students have the opportunity to contribute. Ask students to explain or provide evidence to support their contributions, connect their contributions to specific course concepts and readings, redirect or keep the conversation on track, and revisit discussion guidelines as needed.

For large-enrollment courses, you might ask TAs or course assistants to join small groups or monitor discussion board posting. While it’s important for students to do most of the talking and posting, TAs can support students in the discussion, and their presence can help keep the discussion on track. If you have TAs who lead discussion sections, you might consider sharing some of these discussion management strategies and considerations with them, and discuss how the discussion sections can and will expand upon discussions from the larger class.    

Give students time to think before, during, and after the discussion

Thinking time will allow students to prepare more meaningful contributions to the discussion and creates opportunities for more students, not just the ones that are the quickest to respond, to contribute to the conversation. Comfort with silence is important following a posed question. Some thinking time activities include:   

• “ Silent meeting ” (Armstrong, 2020): Devote class time to students silently engaging with course materials and commenting in a shared document. You can follow this “silent meeting” with small group discussions. In a large enrollment class, this strategy can allow students to engage more deeply and collaboratively with material and their peers. 
• Think-Pair-Share : Give students time to think before participating. In response to an open-ended question, ask students to first think on their own for a few minutes, then pair up to discuss their ideas with their partner. Finally, ask a few pairs to share their main takeaways with the whole class. 
• Discussion pause : Give students time to think and reflect on the discussion so far. Pause the discussion for a few minutes for students to independently restate the question, issue, or problem, and summarize the points made. Encourage students to write down new insights, unanswered questions, etc. 
• Extend the discussion: Encourage students to continue the class discussion by leveraging asynchronous course spaces (e.g.: CourseWorks discussion board). You may ask students to summarize the discussion, extend the discussion by contributing new ideas, or pose follow-up questions that will be discussed asynchronously or used to begin the next in-class discussion. 
• Polls to launch the discussion : Pose a poll closed-ended question and give students time to think and respond individually. See responses in real time and ask students to discuss the results. This can be a great warm up activity for a pair, small group, or whole class discussion, especially in large classes in which it may be more challenging to engage all students. 

Wrapping up Classroom Discussion 

Ensure that the discussion meets the learning objectives of the course or class session, and that students are leaving the discussion with the knowledge and skills that you want them to acquire. Give students an opportunity to reflect on and share what they have learned. This will help them make connections between other class material and previous class discussions. It is also an opportunity for you to gauge how the discussion went and consider what you might need to clarify or shift for future discussions. 

Debrief the Discussion

How will you know the discussion has met the learning objectives of the course or class session? How will you ensure students make connections between broader course concepts and the discussion?

Set aside time to debrief the discussion. This might be groups sharing out their discussion take-aways, designated students summarizing the key points made and questions raised, or asking students to reflect and share what they learned. Rather than summarizing the discussion yourself, partner with your students; see the section on Student Roles above for strategies. 

• Closing Reflection: Ask students to reflect on and process their learning by identifying key takeaways. Carve out 2-5 minutes at the end of class for students to reflect on the discussion, either in writing or orally. You might consider collecting written reflections from students at the end of class, or after class through a Google Form or CourseWorks post. Consider asking students to not only reflect on what they learned from the discussion, but to also summarize key ideas or insights and/or pose new questions.

Collect Feedback, Reflect, Iterate  

How will you determine the effectiveness of class discussion? How can you invite students into creating the learning space? 

Feedback: Student feedback is a great way to gauge the effectiveness and success of class discussion. It’s important to include opportunities for feedback regularly and frequently throughout the semester; for feedback collection prompts and strategies, see the CTL’s resource on Early and Mid-Semester Student Feedback . You might collect this through PollEverywhere, a Google Form, or CourseWorks Survey. Classes of all sizes and modalities can benefit from collecting this type of feedback from students.

Reflect: Before you engage with your students’ feedback, it’s important to take time and reflect for yourself: How do you think the discussion went? Did your students achieve the learning goals that you had hoped? If not, what might you do differently? You can then couple your own reflection with your students’ feedback to determine what is working well, as well as what might need to change for discussions to be more effective.

Iterate: Not all class discussions will go according to plan, but feedback and reflection can help you identify those key areas for improvement. Share aggregate feedback data with your students, as well as what you hope will go differently in future discussions.   

Asynchronous discussion spaces are an effective way for students to prepare for in-class discussion, as well as expand upon what they have already discussed in class. Asynchronous discussion boards also offer a great space for students to reflect upon the discussion, and provide informal feedback. 

Columbia Tools to Support Asynchronous Discussion 

There are a number of Columbia tools that can support asynchronous discussion spaces. Some options that instructors might consider include: 

• CourseWorks Discussion boards : CourseWorks discussion boards offer instructors a number of customizable options including: threaded or focused discussions , post “like” functionality , graded discussion posts , group discussions , and more. For further support with your CourseWorks discussion board, see the CTL’s CourseWorks Support Page or contact the CTL at [email protected] to set up a consultation. 
• Ed Discussion (via CourseWorks): Starting in Fall 2021, instructors will have access to Ed Discussion within their CourseWorks site. For support on getting started with Ed Discussion, see their Quick Start Guide , or contact the CTL at [email protected] . For strategies and examples on how to enhance your course’s asynchronous discussion opportunities using Ed Discussion’s advanced features, refer to Enhance your Course Discussion Boards for Learning: Three Strategies Using Ed Discussion .    

References and Further Reading 

Anderson, L. W., & Krathwohl, D. R. (2001). A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing: A revision of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives. New York: Longman.

Armstrong, B. (2020). To Spark Discussion in a Zoom Class, Try a ‘Silent Meeting .’ The Chronicle of Higher Education. November 18, 2020.

Barkley, E.F. (2010). Student Engagement Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty . Jossey-Bass.

Barkley, E.F.; Major, C.H.; and Cross, K.P. (2014). Collaborative Learning Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty . Second Edition. Jossey-Bass. 

Barnard Center for Engaged Pedagogy. (2021). Crafting community agreements .

Brookfield, S. D., & Preskill, S. (2016). The Discussion Book: 50 Great Ways to Get People Talking . Wiley.

Cashin, W.E. (2011). Effective Classroom Discussions . IDEA Paper #49. Retrieved from www.ideaedu.org 

Center for Research on Teaching and Learning. Guidelines For Classroom Interactions. Retrieved from http://www.crlt.umich.edu/examples-discussion-guidelines

Davis, B.G. (2009). Tools for Teaching , 2 nd Edition. 

Hancock, C., & Rowland, B. (2017). Online and out of synch: Using discussion roles in online asynchronous discussions. Cogent Education, 4(1).

Howard, J.R. (2015). Discussion in the College Classroom: Getting Your Students Engaged and Participating in Person and Online . Wiley. 

Howard, J.R. (2019) How to Hold a Better Class Discussion: Advice Guide. Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/20190523-ClassDiscussion

The K. Patricia Cross Academy. Making Good Use of Online Discussion Boards. Retrieved from https://kpcrossacademy.org/making-good-use-of-online-discussion-boards/  

Read more about Columbia undergraduate students’ experiences with discussion

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• Assessing Class Participation

Participation is an important part of a student’s grade in virtually all Harvard College courses; often, it counts for as much as 20% of a student’s final grade. And yet, when it comes to assessing their students' class participation, we frequently see instructors fall back on what amounts to a highly impressionistic approach, assigning grades at the end of the term based on a vague sense of how much or how meaningfully a student intervened in several months of class discussions. In many cases, moreover, these vague, retrospective judgments may depend on a host of untested assumptions about the extent to which the frequency or confidence with which students speak in class accurately reflects their level of engagement with or mastery of the course material.

In recognition of the fact that assessing participation may be more complicated than is often assumed, and that our practice in this regard raises significant questions about equity and the extent to which students feel that they belong in our classrooms, we suggest that instructors employ the following strategies:

Create multiple ways of participating . There are many ways in which students can share their current thinking on a topic and/or engage with their classmates beyond raising their hands in a whole-class discussion. As we discovered during the 2020–2021 year of remote instruction, some students who find it challenging or unhelpful to try to insert themselves into a running oral conversation might be sitting on fascinating thoughts that they'd be more comfortable sharing in writing, with more time or space for revision and reflection, or in smaller groups of their peers. Here are some other vectors through which students might participate in an ongoing conversation:

• Small group discussions, jigsaws, gallery walks, or pair-share activities in class . See our advice on active learning and ABLConnect mini-site for dozens of ideas about how to break up your class discussions into smaller paired or group-oriented segments.
• Assign roles . Students needn't all be prepared to participate the same way in every class. By assigning students specific roles—"you prepare to discuss the author's use of metaphors; you be prepared to analyze the author's use of sources in the footnotes; etc."—you can help students feel like essential members of a collective project, and create a dedicated space for them in the flow of in-class discussion.
• Online discussion . Consider using an online discussion platform such as discussion boards on Canvas, Slack , or Ed Discussion . Not all participation needs to happen live in class; in some cases asynchronous participation may be easier for students to complete, and easier for you to assign and assess.

Be clear about expectations . We too often take for granted that students know what it means to participate adequately and effectively in our courses. The reality is that instructors' expectations can vary quite radically from one course to the next, let alone across disciplines and course modalities. Make sure that you are explicit and transparent with students about how often, and in what ways, you would like them to intervene in different venues within the course. Likewise, make sure that you are explicit and transparent about how students will be assessed. Are you counting the number of contributions they make to an online discussion board or in-class discussion? Are you planning to judge the quality of their comments (and what does "quality" mean?)? Do you prefer that students contribute to the conversational thread that you've been developing, or is it equally acceptable to send the conversation in a new direction? (Hopefully you can make students feel that it's ok to take risks and make mistakes, as wrong answers and misconceptions are often just as valuable to their own and their peers' learning as are right answers!)

Give feedback . If someone isn't participating in the way that you would like them to, reach out to them and let them know! While you may be reluctant to "embarrass" a quiet student by flagging their relative lack of participation in class, in fact, they may be grateful to you for naming your concern and engaging them in a strategic conversation about how they might participate more effectively in class. Asking a student about their experience of class, and inviting them to think with you about how they might be more visibly involved, is a great way not only to increase their participation, but also to get to know about their interests in the course and about how your teaching is coming across.

Create structure and space . Insofar as you do want to stick to assessing students' real-time oral participation in class discussions, make sure to create structure and give your students time to process their thoughts. Resist the temptation to call on the first hand that's raised; instead, give multiple students time to raise their hands ("Let me give you a minute to think and raise your hands, and then we'll go down the list"), and create—and stick to—a queue so that everyone who wishes to join is acknowledged and is guaranteed a turn before the conversation runs off on a tangent that leaves the fourth, fifth, or sixth student feeling like they've lost the chance to say what they wanted to say. It's rarely the case that the first reaction to a problem is the most comprehensive or nuanced one; why should we run our class discussions in this fashion?

Assess promptly . Make sure to record/journal about the trajectory of each class meeting as soon as possible after the conclusion of class. We are all imperfect at remembering accurately who participated in a discussion, what they said, how it propelled or retarded the flow, etc. In the worst case scenario, we tend to overcredit the students whom we already consider to be strong with having made the most important interventions (and vice versa), further widening the equity gap. Make sure, then, to build in a practice of sitting down for a few minutes right after your class period ends to record what actually happened, whether you do so in a tabular or narrative format. (NB: This practice will also help you in the event that you teach the same course or material in the future!)

• Designing Your Course
• In the Classroom
• When/Why/How: Some General Principles of Responding to Student Work
• Consistency and Equity in Grading
• Assessing Non-Traditional Assignments
• Decreasing Student Anxiety about Grades
• Beyond “the Grade”: Alternative Approaches to Assessment
• Getting Feedback
• Equitable & Inclusive Teaching
• Advising and Mentoring
• Teaching and Your Career
• Teaching Remotely
• Tools and Platforms
• The Science of Learning
• Bok Publications
• Other Resources Around Campus

What is an assessed academic group discussion?

This is the first of three chapters about Group Discussions . To complete this reader, read each chapter carefully and then unlock and complete our materials to check your understanding.   

– Discuss the six most common academic assignments

– Explore group discussions in detail, explaining their purpose and assessment criteria

– Discuss the skills learned through successful completion of group discussions

Chapter 1: What is an assessed academic group discussion?

Chapter 2: Which skills make for effective group discussions?

Chapter 3: What are the nine pitfalls of university discussions?

Students will be assessed in a variety of ways during their time at university, and each assessment is generally just as important (if not more important) than the last. While essays and exams might be familiar territory to most students, an assessed  group discussion   may very well be a new and daunting experience. Knowing how to correctly listen to, respond to and structure a successful group discussion can be a challenging task, which is why our academic experts have created this short three-chapter reader. Chapter 1 introduces the basics of academic discussions, Chapter 2 explores the skills that are needed for an effective discussion and Chapter 3 highlights the nine most common pitfalls that students should avoid. 

Which academic assignments are most common?

While universities might get creative in the types of assessment that they expect students to complete, there are six common forms of assignment that students should expect and become confident in.

What exactly is a group discussion?

Group discussions   are a type of assessment in which a small team of students are required to discuss an arranged topic in front of a small number of assessors. Such discussions typically last between eight and fifteen minutes and are usually conducted in groups of three to six students. To determine the topic of the discussion, students are normally provided with a discussion prompt. This prompt may include images, a number of words and phrases  to assist memory, and a specific question to guide the debate, such as the examples below:

‘Why did Brexit happen and how has this affected the EU?’

‘Is the air pollution that one country produces the world’s responsibility?’

‘How can technology assist language learning in the classroom?’

While such prompts may be provided to the students a week or two before the day of assessment, they are normally provided just before the  group discussion   starts. Students must therefore become familiar with and be able to predict the types of topics that will be expected in their assessed discussion.

Why do university use group discussions?

Group discussions   are designed to prepare students for future participation in academic seminar discussions. Out of all the assessment methods, group discussions perhaps demand the most from students and assessors and demonstrate and strengthen a wide variety of useful skills . This academic assignment allows students to show off their presentation and listening skills as well as demonstrate their teamwork, communication, persuasiveness and delivery.

Group discussions   also help students to:

• improve confidence
• explore topics in depth
• improve language skills
• strengthen conceptual knowledge
• increase retention of factual knowledge
• develop communication and critical thinking skills

How are group discussions usually assessed?

While assessment criteria will change from university to university, the most common method of assessing a  group discussion   is to focus on delivery , interaction, listening skills , language use and topic knowledge. Students therefore tend to perform poorly during group discussions if they are nervous of speaking in public, if they lack the knowledge necessary to contribute to the conversation, or if they have a poor command of the language.

Now that you understand the basics of  group discussions , it might be a good idea to test your knowledge by unlocking the Chapter 1 Worksheet. Once completed, students may then wish to progress to Chapter 2 where we discuss how body language , delivery strategies and discussion strategies make for effective assessed group discussions. 

To reference this reader:

Academic Marker (2022) Group Discussions . Available at: https://academicmarker.com/academic-guidance/assignments/group-discussions/ (Accessed: Date Month Year).

• Indiana University
• University of Waterloo
• UNSW Sydney

Once you’ve completed all three chapters in this short reader about Group Discussions , you might then wish to download our Chapter Worksheets to check your progress or print for your students. These professional PDF worksheets can be easily accessed for only a few Academic Marks .

Chapter 1 explores the topic: What is an assessed academic group discussion? Our Chapter 1 Worksheet (containing guidance, activities and answer keys) can be accessed here at the click of a button. 

Chapter 2 explores the topic: Which skills make for effective group discussions? Our Chapter2 Worksheet (containing guidance, activities and answer keys) can be accessed here at the click of a button. 

Chapter 3 explores the topic: What are the nine pitfalls of university discussions? Our Chapter 3 Worksheet (containing guidance, activities and answer keys) can be accessed here at the click of a button. 

To save yourself 2 Marks , click on the button below to gain unlimited access to all of our Group Discussions Chapter Worksheets. This  All-in-1 Pack includes every chapter, activity and answer key related to this topic in one handy and professional PDF.

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Assessing by Discussion Board

A discussion board is an online communication tool that lets students and teachers take part in discussion in a virtual environment.  It creates a virtual community of enquiry, allowing peer-to-peer discussions at any time and wherever Internet access is available. Students can post comments, questions and responses, and the discussion board constitutes a record of the discussion. Available as stand-alone applications or as built-in tools in learning-management systems such as Moodle, discussion boards typically allow multiple threaded discussions to be grouped into a forum.

Discussion boards can be used throughout a course and students' contributions assessed at the end of semester, or they can be set up as summative assessment activities. Conceptual discussions and group problem-solving tasks can be facilitated very effectively through discussion boards, while tasks requiring students to post personal reflections to the tutor or to showcase their individual performance are better fulfilled using tools such as a journal or blog.

To help you decide whether to use a blog, a wiki or a discussion forum, visit the page Blog, wiki or forum—which should you use?

• A discussion board can be used to assess a broad range of learning outcomes, including conceptual understanding, generic skills (e.g. reasoning, communication) and interpersonal and teamwork skills.
• Because discussion can take place at any time and in any place, students have a chance to ponder the discussion and produce in-depth and considered reflections, and to review the evolving discussion as often as they like.
• Where the immediacy of a face-to-face discussion in a classroom may alienate some students – for example, those who are new to studying in an Australian university – a discussion board can feel more inclusive, in that students have time to read and review the exchanges of views.
• Students can see and evaluate their peers’ posts, which helps develop a community of enquiry and a more democratic assessment process.
• When their discussion board activities can earn them a mark, students are more inclined to contribute actively and productively to discussion. Richer class discussions result, as well as increased opportunities for students to demonstrate the depth of their learning.
• A discussion board provides a record of students' online contributions, so that assessors can review each student's performance.
• Discussion threads can be archived for future use, for example, as a stimulus for further discussion, or to justify marks in the case of appeals.
• Assessing discussion board contributions sometimes results in students spending excessive time preparing polished contributions around assessment deadlines, rather than engaging in dynamic and generative discussion and debate throughout the semester.
• Contributing regularly to discussion boards can be time-consuming for students, particularly when it entails following the threads of multiple discussions.
• Online discussions do not suit all learning styles. Some students may be unfamiliar with this tool, or uncomfortable using it. For example, students whose first language is not English may be unsure what tone they should adopt in a discussion post.
• Technology-related issues such as system maintenance, outages or unreliable Internet access can disrupt discussion.
• Discussion-board formats may not be customisable to particular users' requirements; for example, the need to upload video presentations.

Design for assessment with discussion boards

When designing assessments that use a discussion board, consider these basic questions:

• to engage students in creatively proposing and exploring ideas on a topic in preparation for a formal face-to-face class seminar?
• to enable students within a small group to generate ideas towards the development of a group position paper on a topic?
• a demonstrated understanding of subject-related concepts
• skill in communicating ideas effectively
• the ability to contribute productively to a socially negotiated group outcome
• demonstrated leadership in facilitating or moderating a group discussion.
• How much, how regularly, how frequently and how spontaneously should students contribute?
• Should students engage in the discussion as individuals or as representatives of a group?
• early practice with low-stakes discussion topics?
• tutorial activities about discussion-board etiquette?
• Will students be required to take the initiative in identifying topics or trigger questions?
• Will the tutor act as an e-moderator, determining how discussions begin, develop and conclude?
• Will e-moderators be rotated between groups to balance out differences in approach?
• the quantity of students' contributions?
• the quality of their contributions?
• a blend of quantity and quality?
• Will students assess their own or their peers' contributions?
• If teachers assess, will they do so individually or in teams?
• Will other people, such as workplace supervisors, assess the contributions? You might have to make the online discussion available to these other parties.
• As formative feedback using the discussion board tool to engage students in a reflective dialogue about the quality of their discussion?
• As generic feedback to the class about the most common strengths and weaknesses in discussion board responses to tasks?

Manage assessment with discussion boards

The following table summarises strategies for discussion board based assessment. Most of these strategies are equally applicable to assessing participation in face-to-face classroom learning activities.

Table 1: Strategies to engage students in more active and productive discussion board tasks for assessment (adapted from Williams & Wache, 2005, p. 6)

Suitable assessment tasks

Reflect on discussion.

Ask students to reflect on how a discussion is evolving or has evolved. The discussion can be their own or a sample discussion thread (if using a sample, make sure the sample participants have been made anonymous). This reflective exercise is useful in encouraging students to identify what makes discussions effective, and to think about the relationship of discussions to the assessment criteria for individual contributions.

Students can move from this reflective activity to self- and peer assessment, either for formative feedback or to contribute towards the summative grade. Students can develop their own reflective responses, and relate this to the assessment criteria.

Sample reflective responses may include:

• explain how posts are related to the previous thread of the discussion
• comment on or express an opinion on a topic
• provide a reason or rationale for the post
• provide substantiating evidence (including the source) for assertions made in a post
• contribute an example that illustrates a point in the discussion based on reading or personal experience
• contribute a link to related reading or other material
• ask for clarification of a post by someone else, or comment on their post
• provide a summary of the discussion thread so far
• analyse the main perspectives being presented by different participants
• pose a new but related question that will take the discussion deeper.

Small group reports to the whole class

Sub-groups discuss particular topic areas, then prepare a summary of their group discussion as a contribution to the whole class discussion. Many variations are possible;; for example, sub-group members can visit other discussions to share outcomes, or individual contributions or jointly constructed syntheses can be the subject of assessment.

Role-play discussion

Students adopt particular roles, which they first research and then represent in the discussion. For example, they might present the perspectives of diverse stakeholders seeking funding to advance a community initiative.

Lead or moderate a discussion

Students facilitate or e-moderate, leading a discussion on a particular topic. For example, you could require a student to provide a brief summary of a particular reading, pose some critical questions, monitor the ensuing contributions and  synthesise the key points that emerge. The assessment criteria should reflect the leadership and management aspects of the role. 

Case studies and scenarios

Students engage in discussion analysing a given case study or scenario. Sub-groups pursue particular aspects of the case or scenario, collaboratively prepare summary posts and report their findings.

Retrospective commentary on learning

Ask students to retrieve all their discussion-board posts for the course and prepare a reflective account, commenting on:

• how their understanding of concepts and skills has developed
• how they have contributed to the learning community of their class.

This can be used to substantiate their self-assessment of their learning performance.

Ensure fairness

Assessment using discussion boards is intrinsically fairer for many students, particularly shy students or students in remote locations. But it can disadvantage others; for example, students with a visual impairment or dyslexia. Ensure that you set up discussion conditions so that all students have an equal chance of success. For example:

• Advise students of any flexibility that is available in the assessment plan to accommodate special needs.
• Ensure that students have access to the discussion board, and that they understand how to use its features to engage actively in the discussion. Give them practice in a low-stakes activity before you require them to participate in a high-stakes summative assessment discussion.
• Appropriately limit the proportion of the mark that derives from discussion-board contributions, in accordance with its role in the assessment design.
• Monitor discussion-board activities to ensure that students are appropriately inclusive in their discussions.

Table 2: Rubric for assessing the content of discussion-board contributions (Nandi, Chang & Balbo, 2009)

Table 3: Rubric for assessing the interaction quality of discussion board contributions (Nandi, Chang & Balbo, 2009)

Table 4: Rubric for assessing objective measures of discussion-board contributions (Nandi, Chang & Balbo, 2009)

• Assess student participation in Moodle discussion forums
• Create a forum in Moodle
• Lam, A. M. (2022). Boost learning with online student discussion forums .  Times Higher Education, 19 December.
• Lieberman, M. (2019). Discussion Boards: Valuable? Overused? Discuss . Inside Higher Ed, 26 March.

Al-Husban, N. A. (2020). Critical thinking skills in asynchronous discussion forums: A case study . International Journal of Technology in Education , 3 (2), 83-91.

Nandi, D., Chang, S. and Balbo, S. (2009). A conceptual framework for assessing interaction quality in online discussion forums. In Same places, different spaces: Proceedings ASCILITE , Auckland.

Oliveira, A. S., Silva, M. A. R., da Silva, D. & Borges, R. C. (2021). Quality assessment of online discussion forums: Construction and validation of a scale that values student perception . Turkish Online Journal of Distance Education , 22 (4), Article 4.

Ononiwu, C. (2021). Role of online discussion forums in enhancing users' cognitive skills.  Journal of Teaching English for Specific and Academic Purposes, 9(3), 307-320. https://doi.org/10.22190/JTESAP2103307O

Patel, N. S. (2021). Development of criticality in thought: A conceptual framework for online student discussion forums in higher education. International Journal of TESOL Studies , 3 (3), 22-40. https://doi.org/10.46451/ijts.2021.09.02

Williams, M. and Wache, D. (2005), "Just link and leave": A recipe for disaster for online discussions. Breaking the Boundaries: The International Experience in Open, Distance and Flexible Education , Adelaide, 17th ODLAA Conference.

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Using Class Discussions as AI-Proof Assessments

Classroom discussions are one way to ensure that students are doing their own work in the age of artificial intelligence.

I admit it: Grading essays has never topped my list of teaching joys. Sure, the moments when a student finally nails a skill after months of hard work make me shout for joy, startling my nearby colleagues (sorry, Ms. Evans), but by and large, it’s hard work. Yet lately, as generative artificial intelligence (AI) headlines swirl in my mind, a new anxiety has crept into my grading life. I increasingly wonder, am I looking at their hard work?

Do you know when I don’t feel this way? During discussions. A ninth grader wiggling the worn corner of her text, leaning forward with excitement over what she’s cleverly noticed about Kambili, rarely makes me wonder, “Are these her ideas?”

While I’ve always thought discussion is important, AI is elevating that importance. This year, I wonder, how can I best leverage discussion in my classroom?

Protocols to Build Discussion Skills

Discussion requires specific skills. I like to allow my students to build theirs with these two protocols.

1. “Micro Lab” discussion. Students take turns answering questions in small groups. They must deliver their answers in a minute or two, either filling their time or running down the clock in silence because in this discussion, there is no cross talk until the end. Additionally, the order in which students answer the questions rotates, meaning that sometimes they have time to process, and other times they must think on their feet. For my classes, I’ve developed four general questions that can work with most texts, but tailored questions are another good option.

Micro Lab practices quick thinking and careful listening to avoid repeating previous answers. These skills are foundational in any discussion. With equal airtime for all voices, I particularly like Micro Lab for classrooms where some voices dominate, and others are consistently quiet. Additionally, I like it for classes in which students are still learning to elaborate on and extend their arguments. Sitting in silence often pushes students to say more.

2. “Concentric circles” discussion. Students form inner and outer circles , facing one partner at a time. The outer circle rotates after each round of sharing, providing students with a variety of partners. To prepare, I ask students to answer a question or two from choices on the board, or I do a quick “quote and note” on scratch paper, jotting down a short quote from the text and noting why it’s significant or interesting. Often at the end, I’ll segue into a whole class share-out, collecting the papers, drawing a name, and asking that student to share their answer.

To participate in discussion, students must feel emboldened to speak in front of their peers. For some of my students, sharing in front of the whole class is intimidating, but with a partner they find more success, building their confidence for larger discussions. I formatively assess this discussion by wandering the room and listening to the pairs, as well as by collecting and reviewing the note cards at the end of class.

Protocols to Build (and Assess) Analytical Writing Skills

Once students feel confident and skilled enough to participate in discussions, how might discussions offer opportunities to practice, develop, and even assess skills that I traditionally assess through writing?

1. “Quote of the day” discussion. In groups of four, students select one unique passage from the reading that they feel is significant. Next, they select their roles, which I write on the board:

• Argument Maker (In one sentence, what does your passage reveal?)
• Contextualizer (What happens just before your passage?)
• Reader (Read the passage aloud and preface that with who is speaking, thinking, or writing: “Kambili thinks” or “Adichie writes.”)
• Analyzer (Explain why the passage proves the argument.)

After some time to prepare, we go through the passages chronologically, and each group shares out, fulfilling their roles.

During a Quote of the Day discussion this year, a student blurted, “Hey, this is like a paragraph.” The jig is up! This discussion helps students understand elements of paragraph structure and practice foundational analytical essay writing skills such as making arguments along with selecting, contextualizing, and analyzing evidence. Hearing groups share out allows me to formatively assess, and I can give the groups real-time verbal feedback. More formal assessment is also possible with a rubric like this one .

2. “Inside/outside” discussion. When I observed a colleague doing this discussion, I knew I wanted to try it. Half the class speaks (insiders), and the other half is given a listening task (outsiders), such as “Make a list of the topics discussed,” “Count how many quotes are used in the discussion,” or even a silly task, like “Meow each time you hear an insightful point and write down that point.” To provide fuel before getting started, I might use guided questions or just ask students to jot down notes for a few moments. Halfway through, the outer circle shares what they heard, and the insiders and outsiders swap roles.

I’m fascinated by the way this discussion includes many of the skills I traditionally assess through analytical writing: making arguments, selecting and analyzing evidence, and using transitions to connect ideas. Listening tasks help nonparticipating students maintain focus, and participating students know they have an authentic audience in their carefully listening peers. The discussion can be assessed using this rubric .

Structured discussion protocols are real-time, screen-free supplements to writing assessment. The structure more equitably supports students who are still developing skills and confidence as they navigate into and contribute to discussions, allowing teachers to more authentically glimpse what our students know, understand, and are able to do.

Rubric Best Practices, Examples, and Templates

A rubric is a scoring tool that identifies the different criteria relevant to an assignment, assessment, or learning outcome and states the possible levels of achievement in a specific, clear, and objective way. Use rubrics to assess project-based student work including essays, group projects, creative endeavors, and oral presentations.

Rubrics can help instructors communicate expectations to students and assess student work fairly, consistently and efficiently. Rubrics can provide students with informative feedback on their strengths and weaknesses so that they can reflect on their performance and work on areas that need improvement.

How to Get Started

Best practices, moodle how-to guides.

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Step 1: Analyze the assignment

The first step in the rubric creation process is to analyze the assignment or assessment for which you are creating a rubric. To do this, consider the following questions:

• What is the purpose of the assignment and your feedback? What do you want students to demonstrate through the completion of this assignment (i.e. what are the learning objectives measured by it)? Is it a summative assessment, or will students use the feedback to create an improved product?
• Does the assignment break down into different or smaller tasks? Are these tasks equally important as the main assignment?
• What would an “excellent” assignment look like? An “acceptable” assignment? One that still needs major work?
• How detailed do you want the feedback you give students to be? Do you want/need to give them a grade?

Step 2: Decide what kind of rubric you will use

Types of rubrics: holistic, analytic/descriptive, single-point

Holistic Rubric. A holistic rubric includes all the criteria (such as clarity, organization, mechanics, etc.) to be considered together and included in a single evaluation. With a holistic rubric, the rater or grader assigns a single score based on an overall judgment of the student’s work, using descriptions of each performance level to assign the score.

Advantages of holistic rubrics:

• Can p lace an emphasis on what learners can demonstrate rather than what they cannot
• Save grader time by minimizing the number of evaluations to be made for each student
• Can be used consistently across raters, provided they have all been trained

Disadvantages of holistic rubrics:

• Provide less specific feedback than analytic/descriptive rubrics
• Can be difficult to choose a score when a student’s work is at varying levels across the criteria
• Any weighting of c riteria cannot be indicated in the rubric

Analytic/Descriptive Rubric . An analytic or descriptive rubric often takes the form of a table with the criteria listed in the left column and with levels of performance listed across the top row. Each cell contains a description of what the specified criterion looks like at a given level of performance. Each of the criteria is scored individually.

Advantages of analytic rubrics:

• Provide detailed feedback on areas of strength or weakness
• Each criterion can be weighted to reflect its relative importance

Disadvantages of analytic rubrics:

• More time-consuming to create and use than a holistic rubric
• May not be used consistently across raters unless the cells are well defined
• May result in giving less personalized feedback

Single-Point Rubric . A single-point rubric is breaks down the components of an assignment into different criteria, but instead of describing different levels of performance, only the “proficient” level is described. Feedback space is provided for instructors to give individualized comments to help students improve and/or show where they excelled beyond the proficiency descriptors.

Advantages of single-point rubrics:

• Easier to create than an analytic/descriptive rubric
• Perhaps more likely that students will read the descriptors
• Areas of concern and excellence are open-ended
• May removes a focus on the grade/points
• May increase student creativity in project-based assignments

Disadvantage of analytic rubrics: Requires more work for instructors writing feedback

Step 3 (Optional): Look for templates and examples.

You might Google, “Rubric for persuasive essay at the college level” and see if there are any publicly available examples to start from. Ask your colleagues if they have used a rubric for a similar assignment. Some examples are also available at the end of this article. These rubrics can be a great starting point for you, but consider steps 3, 4, and 5 below to ensure that the rubric matches your assignment description, learning objectives and expectations.

Step 4: Define the assignment criteria

Make a list of the knowledge and skills are you measuring with the assignment/assessment Refer to your stated learning objectives, the assignment instructions, past examples of student work, etc. for help.

  Helpful strategies for defining grading criteria:

• Collaborate with co-instructors, teaching assistants, and other colleagues
• Brainstorm and discuss with students
• Can they be observed and measured?
• Are they important and essential?
• Are they distinct from other criteria?
• Are they phrased in precise, unambiguous language?
• Revise the criteria as needed
• Consider whether some are more important than others, and how you will weight them.

Step 5: Design the rating scale

Most ratings scales include between 3 and 5 levels. Consider the following questions when designing your rating scale:

• Given what students are able to demonstrate in this assignment/assessment, what are the possible levels of achievement?
• How many levels would you like to include (more levels means more detailed descriptions)
• Will you use numbers and/or descriptive labels for each level of performance? (for example 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 and/or Exceeds expectations, Accomplished, Proficient, Developing, Beginning, etc.)
• Don’t use too many columns, and recognize that some criteria can have more columns that others . The rubric needs to be comprehensible and organized. Pick the right amount of columns so that the criteria flow logically and naturally across levels.

Step 6: Write descriptions for each level of the rating scale

Artificial Intelligence tools like Chat GPT have proven to be useful tools for creating a rubric. You will want to engineer your prompt that you provide the AI assistant to ensure you get what you want. For example, you might provide the assignment description, the criteria you feel are important, and the number of levels of performance you want in your prompt. Use the results as a starting point, and adjust the descriptions as needed.

Building a rubric from scratch

For a single-point rubric , describe what would be considered “proficient,” i.e. B-level work, and provide that description. You might also include suggestions for students outside of the actual rubric about how they might surpass proficient-level work.

For analytic and holistic rubrics , c reate statements of expected performance at each level of the rubric.

• Consider what descriptor is appropriate for each criteria, e.g., presence vs absence, complete vs incomplete, many vs none, major vs minor, consistent vs inconsistent, always vs never. If you have an indicator described in one level, it will need to be described in each level.
• You might start with the top/exemplary level. What does it look like when a student has achieved excellence for each/every criterion? Then, look at the “bottom” level. What does it look like when a student has not achieved the learning goals in any way? Then, complete the in-between levels.
• For an analytic rubric , do this for each particular criterion of the rubric so that every cell in the table is filled. These descriptions help students understand your expectations and their performance in regard to those expectations.

Well-written descriptions:

• Describe observable and measurable behavior
• Use parallel language across the scale
• Indicate the degree to which the standards are met

Step 7: Create your rubric

Create your rubric in a table or spreadsheet in Word, Google Docs, Sheets, etc., and then transfer it by typing it into Moodle. You can also use online tools to create the rubric, but you will still have to type the criteria, indicators, levels, etc., into Moodle. Rubric creators: Rubistar , iRubric

Step 8: Pilot-test your rubric

Prior to implementing your rubric on a live course, obtain feedback from:

• Teacher assistants

Try out your new rubric on a sample of student work. After you pilot-test your rubric, analyze the results to consider its effectiveness and revise accordingly.

• Limit the rubric to a single page for reading and grading ease
• Use parallel language . Use similar language and syntax/wording from column to column. Make sure that the rubric can be easily read from left to right or vice versa.
• Use student-friendly language . Make sure the language is learning-level appropriate. If you use academic language or concepts, you will need to teach those concepts.
• Share and discuss the rubric with your students . Students should understand that the rubric is there to help them learn, reflect, and self-assess. If students use a rubric, they will understand the expectations and their relevance to learning.
• Consider scalability and reusability of rubrics. Create rubric templates that you can alter as needed for multiple assignments.
• Maximize the descriptiveness of your language. Avoid words like “good” and “excellent.” For example, instead of saying, “uses excellent sources,” you might describe what makes a resource excellent so that students will know. You might also consider reducing the reliance on quantity, such as a number of allowable misspelled words. Focus instead, for example, on how distracting any spelling errors are.

Example of an analytic rubric for a final paper

Example of a holistic rubric for a final paper

Single-Point Rubric

More examples:

• Single Point Rubric Template ( variation )
• Analytic Rubric Template make a copy to edit
• A Rubric for Rubrics
• Bank of Online Discussion Rubrics in different formats
• Mathematical Presentations Descriptive Rubric
• Math Proof Assessment Rubric
• Kansas State Sample Rubrics
• Design Single Point Rubric

Technology Tools: Rubrics in Moodle

• Moodle Docs: Rubrics
• Moodle Docs: Grading Guide (use for single-point rubrics)

Tools with rubrics (other than Moodle)

• Google Assignments
• Turnitin Assignments: Rubric or Grading Form

Other resources

• DePaul University (n.d.). Rubrics .
• Gonzalez, J. (2014). Know your terms: Holistic, Analytic, and Single-Point Rubrics . Cult of Pedagogy.
• Goodrich, H. (1996). Understanding rubrics . Teaching for Authentic Student Performance, 54 (4), 14-17. Retrieved from   
• Miller, A. (2012). Tame the beast: tips for designing and using rubrics.
• Ragupathi, K., Lee, A. (2020). Beyond Fairness and Consistency in Grading: The Role of Rubrics in Higher Education. In: Sanger, C., Gleason, N. (eds) Diversity and Inclusion in Global Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore.

Center for Teaching Innovation

Resource library.

• Teaching students to evaluate each other

Peer assessment

Peer assessment or peer review provides a structured learning process for students to critique and provide feedback to each other on their work. It helps students develop lifelong skills in assessing and providing feedback to others, and also equips them with skills to self-assess and improve their own work. 

If you are interested in facilitating a team member evaluation process for group projects, see the page on  Teaching students to evaluate each other .

Why use peer assessment? 

Peer assessment can: 

• Empower students to take responsibility for and manage their own learning. 
• Enable students to learn to assess and give others constructive feedback to develop lifelong assessment skills. 
• Enhance students' learning through knowledge diffusion and exchange of ideas. 
• Motivate students to engage with course material more deeply. 

Considerations for using peer assessment 

• Let students know the rationale for doing peer review. Explain the expectations and benefits of engaging in a peer review process. 
• Consider having students evaluate anonymous assignments for more objective feedback. 
• Be prepared to give feedback on students’ feedback to each other. Display some examples of feedback of varying quality and discuss which kind of feedback is useful and why. 
• Give clear directions and time limits for in-class peer review sessions and set defined deadlines for out-of-class peer review assignments. 
• Listen to group feedback discussions and provide guidance and input when necessary. 
• Student familiarity and ownership of criteria tend to enhance peer assessment validity, so involve students in a discussion of the criteria used. Consider involving students in developing an assessment rubric. 

Getting started with peer assessment 

• Identify assignments or activities for which students might benefit from peer feedback. 
• Consider breaking a larger assignment into smaller pieces and incorporating peer assessment opportunities at each stage. For example, assignment outline, first draft, second draft, etc. 
• Design guidelines or   rubrics   with clearly defined tasks for the reviewer. 
• Introduce rubrics through learning exercises to ensure students have the ability to apply the rubric effectively. 
• Determine whether peer review activities will be conducted as in-class or out-of-class assignments. For out-of-class assignments, peer assessments can be facilitated through Canvas using tools such as FeedbackFruits peer review and group member evaluation , Canvas peer review assignment , or Turnitin . See the Comparison of peer evaluation tools to learn more and/or set up a consultation by contacting CTI ." 
• Help students learn to carry out peer assessment by modeling appropriate, constructive criticism and descriptive feedback through your own comments on student work and well-constructed rubrics. 
• Incorporate small feedback groups where written comments on assignments can be explained and discussed with the receiver. 

Organizing Your Social Sciences Research Assignments

• Annotated Bibliography
• Analyzing a Scholarly Journal Article
• Group Presentations
• Dealing with Nervousness
• Using Visual Aids
• Grading Someone Else's Paper
• Types of Structured Group Activities
• Group Project Survival Skills
• Leading a Class Discussion
• Multiple Book Review Essay
• Reviewing Collected Works
• Writing a Case Analysis Paper
• Writing a Case Study
• About Informed Consent
• Writing Field Notes
• Writing a Policy Memo
• Writing a Reflective Paper
• Writing a Research Proposal
• Generative AI and Writing
• Acknowledgments

Introduction

Student-led in-class discussion assignments involve students assuming the role of instructor by preparing for and leading the class in summarizing, interpreting, and evaluating a particular course reading, issue, or topic. It can take the form of an individual student leading the discussion or a small group of students leading the discussion. The role of the professor is to define the scope of the discussion, review the lead student’s presentation and discussion prompts, monitor student participation in the discussion, improvise new directions and reflections when necessary, provide a summary of what has transpired at the end of the discussion, and assess learning outcomes, often based on a rubric [a scoring tool that explicitly describes the professor’s performance expectations]. The order by which students lead a class discussion is determined most frequently by a method of voluntary sign-up or assigned ahead of time based on either a predetermined protocol or randomly chosen by the professor.

Byrd, Jr., Jack and Suzanne Goodney Lea. Guidebook for Student-Centered Classroom Discussions . Interactivity Foundation, 2008; Discussion . Chicago Center for Teaching. University of Chicago; Novak, Sandi, and Cara Slattery. Deep Discourse: A Framework for Cultivating Student-Led Discussions . Bloomington, Indiana: Solution Tree Press, 2017; Muller, Heidi L. "Facilitating Classroom Discussion: Lessons from Student-Led Discussions." (2000). Paper Presented at the Annual Meeting of the National Communication Association (86th, Seattle, WA, November 9-12, 2000).

Benefits of Leading a Class Discussion

The benefits and expected learning outcomes for students leading a classroom discussion can include improving your ability to synthesize scholarly research, developing your oral communication skills, learning how to effectively engage in a constructive dialogue with an audience, and responding to feedback or questions in a clear and concise manner that encourages further discussion. Similar to giving an oral presentation, the skills acquired from successfully completing this assignment are transferable to the skills needed in any workplace environment where communicating your thoughts effectively to a team or within a group setting is an essential part of your day-to-day responsibilities. Listed below are some reasons why professors assign student-led discussions:

Benefits for a Student Discussion Leader [individual or group]

• Leadership and Preparation Skills . For individualized in-class discussion assignments, facilitating a discussion involves assuming a leadership role, identifying the main issues to be examined, and developing the questions to be asked. You also gain leadership skills from managing the discussion, shaping its direction, and making sure everyone has an opportunity to participate in the discussion.
• Freedom to Set the Learning Agenda . Leading a class discussion places you in the role of being the instructor. Therefore, embrace the opportunity to take ownership of not just your own learning about a course reading or topic, but from the act of facilitating all aspects of what happens during the discussion. Although your professor is present to supervise the activities, you are in control of the specific proceedings.
• Motivate a Group Discussion . This assignment also helps you develop an ability to motivate others to actively participate in the discussion. There are several strategies you can use to create a relaxed, comfortable setting in which everyone feels comfortable [see below]. Leading a class discussion can also teach you how to be inclusive by helping particular students not feel marginalized by letting them know that their thoughts and opinions matter .
• Improve Listening Skills .  As the discussion leader, not only must you ask good questions, but you need to listen carefully to what is being said. Leading a discussion can help you to be reflective about what others are saying, to contemplate what this means in relation to the topic or course reading, and to hear the often subtle differences in how audience members frame their perspective or opinion. Consider the act of listening to not only encompass verbal cues, but include non-verbal body language concerning how people participate and what this signaling might mean, for example, in the type of follow up questions you ask.
• Manage Silence or Disengagement in a Positive Manner . Invariably, there will be moments when no one answers your question or the discussion ends abruptly--all that’s left is silence. As the lead facilitator, you are responsible for moving the discussion forward. This can be done by asking a new question, expanding upon a prior discussion point, or altering the direction of the discussion. Note, however, that silence may signal that people are simply contemplating what they want to say, so always let the silence linger for a bit before interjecting.
• Improve Critical Thinking . An in-class discussion improves what can be thought of as critical thinking in motion as classmates continuously speak and discuss key issues. For example, a student may respond in an unexpected way to your question and you then have to improvise in that moment about how to use that feedback in a way that solicits further discussion or creates a opportunity for sharing new ideas. Leading class discussions forces you to be analytical about what is being discussed and to insert yourself in the discussions when needed to create an even more robust dialogue.

Benefits for a Classroom Audience

• Peer-to-Peer Learning . Student-led class discussions are a form of reciprocal, mutually supportive learning. In other words, it is an in-class activity that offers students the opportunity to learn from each other. As a result, it encourages participants to take responsibility for their own learning and, more generally, learning how to learn through acts of dialogue, debate, and deliberation.
• Minimizes Authoritative Power Dynamics . The peer-to-peer learning format of student-led discussion assignments can contribute to a more dynamic and inclusive conversation among students because it reduces the discomfort some students may feel about challenging statements made by the professor. A student leading the discussion can create a better give and take atmosphere within the classroom than a professor who [presumably] carries the weight of authoritative knowledge.
• Relate to Contemporary Lived Experiences . Depending on the course reading, topic, or issue, the discussion can include references to the contemporary lived experiences of the student discussion leader and the student audience. This grounds the discussion in a reality that is more connected to student’s understanding and sense of meaning-making than what your professor may be able to offer as a reference point or example [i.e., “Back when I was your age....”].
• Potential to Change Attitudes and Ideas . As with any classroom discussion, the information shared and debated openly in student-led discussions can encourage participants to re-examine the research problem with a fresh perspective or with a new understanding of the study's implications or proposed actions to be taken. This can be a catalyst for reassessing a particular decision or reshape an approach to a problem that evolves organically through student-to student discussion rather than simply being prompted by the professor.

Guide to Discussion Skills . Academic Skills Toolkit, University of New South Wales, Sydney; Novak, Sandi, and Cara Slattery. Deep Discourse: A Framework for Cultivating Student-Led Discussions . Bloomington, Indiana: Solution Tree Press, 2017; Rhodes, Gale and Robert Schaible. "Talking Students/Listening Teachers: The Student-led Discussion." Issues of Inquiry in College Learning and Teaching 15 (1992): 44-61; Rugutt, John, and Caroline C. Chemosit. "What Motivates Students to Learn? Contribution of Student-to-Student Relations, Student-faculty Interaction and Critical Thinking Skills." Educational Research Quarterly 32 (March 2009): 16-28.

How to Approach Leading a Class Discussion

The structure of a student-led discussion can vary widely depending on the goals of the assignment. Described below are general suggestions on how to prepare to lead a class discussion.

If you are leading a class discussion about a specific course reading, consider the following:

• Carefully read the material and take notes . Focus on the main elements of the study and their significance in relation to the research problem or topic. Your notes will form the basis of what you want to emphasize in your brief summary introduction to the class [often your professor will require that you to provide a brief summary of the reading before you begin the discussion].
• Organize your ideas around the elements of the study . Think critically about the significance of the research problem, the suitability of the method used to gather information, the thoroughness of the author's discussion about the findings, and the appropriateness of the author’s conclusions, including any limitations and their implications, the validity of any recommendations in addressing the research problem. If there are recommendations for further research, consider what areas of study might be missing or specific recommendation that requires additional context or clarification.
• Based on these elements of the course reading, develop a set of questions that will help your classmates understand and evaluate the research and its implications . The number of questions you ask depends on the amount of time allotted to lead the class discussion. If you have a limited period of time, focus on questions that will encourage audience engagement and understanding. This can include asking the audience why they may agree or disagree with specific statement, recommendation, or conclusion, offering a contrarian or controversial perspective, or asking what stood out about the study and to explain why.
• In general, a good discussion begins with a broad question that lays a foundation for unpacking specific aspects of the study. This approach frames the parameters of the overall discussion. For example, a course reading studying the effects of the pandemic on learning among minority students in middle school, could begin with a question concerning why this study is important, followed by discussing if specific examples cited by the author were effective in providing a complete picture of the problem and then, if they do not, asking the audience for evidence-based examples that they believe would be better at explaining these effects. Note that it is highly unlikely everyone will agree with such a broad opening question, so this reaction should encourage a good discussion.

NOTE: Often your professor will ask you to share your questions and discussion prompts ahead of time in order to provide constructive feedback and clarification. If this is not required, do it anyway. Professors are skilled in posing questions that help students think critically about the subject matter. As such, obtaining advice from your professor beforehand can help you formulate questions that will most likely evoke thoughtful and insightful responses and encourage everyone to share their insights and opinions.

ANOTHER NOTE: If your audience comes to a consensus about the importance the course reading or have finished answering your questions before the discussion is supposed to end, you can continue the dialogue by shifting focus towards asking your classmates to think about how they would approach building on the original study or how to transform the findings to create new policy or actions, or even why the audience has come to such a quick conclusion about the study. Follow up questions not only can cover the research itself, but they can also focus on future applications of the study or contemplating what new discoveries may be derived from the research in the future.

If you are leading a class discussion about a specific research problem or topic, consider the following:

• Read all the course readings on the topic that is to be discussed and take notes. Review past studies that may be relevant based on the sources that have been cited in the course materials you read and are listed in the course syllabus. Use the "cited by" feature of Google Scholar to identify more recent, related studies about the topic or issue. Do this by copying the title of the article into Google Scholar. If anyone has subsequently cited that article in their research, those works can be viewed by clicking on "Cited by" link that is followed by a number below the record [e.g., Cited by 61, showing that the study has been subsequently cited 61 times].
• Use the notes you have taken to organize your ideas around specific problems, controversial or confusing issues, and/or key research questions relating to the topic. Focus on themes that researchers have identified or overall concerns that have repeatedly emerged in the context of research findings.
• Use the themes you have developed to create a set of discussion points that will help your audience understand and evaluate the main arguments [i.e.., the evidence-based claims or thesis statements you have found underpinning the issue or topic].
• Formulate questions around these discussion points that are intended to provoke debate and stimulate further thinking about possible solutions or recommended courses of action. As you formulate these questions, think about how you might answer them and what follow up questions you might want to ask. This can help you develop additional questions to further the discussion in productive ways.

NOTE: It may be necessary to ask close-ended, factual questions [e.g., “What happened when...?; Who was responsible for...?], but these types of questions do not set the stage for a good discussion because they fail to encourage audience members to interpret, analyze, or evaluate. Your role as discussion leader is to utilize evidence from your review of the literature to provoke students to challenge the basic assumptions underlying research about the issue or topic. This approach will encourage active participation in the discussion.

ANOTHER NOTE: As with giving an oral presentation, practice leading the class discussion. While there may not be any way to anticipate the level of audience engagement or the types of questions that might be asked, you should practice delivering your introduction and reading aloud the questions or discussion points you plan to cover. If possible, practice in front of others and ask them to help you prepare by thinking about the questions and providing feedback as if they were in the class.

Al-Amri, Majid. “Student-led Seminars as an Active Learning Strategy to Enhance English as a Foreign Language Procrastinating Students’ Achievement.” Learning and Teaching in Higher Education: Gulf Perspectives 15 (2018):. 2-13; Baran, Evrim, and Ana Paula Correia. "Student Led Facilitation Strategies in Online Discussions." Distance Education 30 (2009): 339-361; Brisbin, Matthew, "Using Student-led Discussion Strategies to Motivate, Increase Thinking, Create Ownership, and Teach Citizenship" Master of Education Action Research Projects. Paper 1, George Fox University, July 15, 2015; Byrd, Jr., Jack and Suzanne Goodney Lea. Guidebook for Student-Centered Classroom Discussions . Interactivity Foundation, 2008; Casteel, Mark A., and K. Robert Bridges. "Goodbye Lecture: A Student-led Seminar Approach for Teaching Upper Division Courses." Teaching of Psychology 34 (2007): 107-110; Discussion . Chicago Center for Teaching. University of Chicago; Flynn, Nora K. "Toward Democratic Discourse: Scaffolding Student-led Discussions in the Social Studies." Teachers College Record 111 (August 2009): 2021-2054; McGinnis, Lee. "Simple but Effective: Rediscovering the Class Discussion." In Developments in Business Simulation and Experiential Learning . Proceedings of the Annual ABSEL conference, vol. 31. 2004; McMullen, Victoria Budzinski. "Using Student-led Seminars and Conceptual Workshops to Increase Student Participation." College Teaching 62 (2014): 62-67; Muller, Heidi L. "Facilitating Classroom Discussion: Lessons from Student-Led Discussions." (2000). Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the National Communication Association (86th, Seattle, WA, November 9-12, 2000); Novak, Sandi, and Cara Slattery. Deep Discourse: A Framework for Cultivating Student-Led Discussions . Bloomington, Indiana: Solution Tree Press, 2017; Wagner, Christopher J., Marcela Ossa Parra, and C. Patrick Proctor. "The Interplay between Student-led Discussions and Argumentative Writing." Tesol Quarterly 51 (June 2017): 438-449; White, Kathleen M., and Robert G. Kolber. "Undergraduate and Graduate Students as Discussion Section Leaders." Teaching of Psychology 5 (February 1978): 6-9.

Structure and Organization

Your professor may have a very prescribed assignment plan, in which case the in-class discussion will be relatively easy to organize. However, most of the time, your professor will only set general guidelines, leaving the responsibility to you about how the discussion could be to structured. Below are general guidelines that can help establish a proper, relaxed atmosphere for the audience.

• Provide a brief introduction that highlights the purpose of the study, its significance, and key findings. You can conclude by asking if everyone agrees with what you have said or if anyone would like to add anything before continuing. Note that you can purposely leave out a main point in order to provoke a response or create an initial conversation with a follow up question [e.g., “well, what about this finding that...?”].
• After the introduction, you can begin the discussion with a interesting or provocative question, a noteworthy quotation from the text, or a visual depiction of something related to the study as alternative methods for starting the discussion. The purpose here is to motivate your audience to be actively engaged in a discussion; once engaged, discussions tend to flow organically as more and more of your classmates want to contribute and build on what others have said.
• As the discussion takes place around a broad, initial question or prompt [e.g., "Why should anyone care about this study’s findings?”], listen carefully to what is said and respect other people’s contributions. Remember that one of your responsibilities as facilitator is to create an inclusive space for discussion. Encourage all members of the audience to contribute before offering your own comments or moving on to the next question.
• To help move the discussion along, be conscious of moments when you can expand upon or clarify comments made by your classmates in order to help them recognize the main issues and to keep everyone focused on the course reading or topic. Expansive or clarifying comments can also be used to circumvent someone from going off on a tangent that steers the discussion away from the original topic or course reading.
• Throughout the process of leading the class discussion, inform without coming across as dogmatic. It is important  that you remain a neutral voice during the proceedings. This is not to say you can’t express an opinion, but it should be grounded in evidence and used to help move the discussion forward [e.g., "I also don’t like the way the city handles safety concerns on the Metro system, but this study shows that...”].
• Also throughout the process of leading the class discussion, take notes while people are speaking so you can conclude by summarizing the main issues discussed, highlight key insights, and indicate divergent viewpoints expressed about the topic. If applicable, leave the audience hanging with a thought to ponder by stating what should be done next. This will help people remember the discussion and reflect on what happened.

NOTE: For discussions that are intended to cover a complicated course reading or topic or there is a lot of time for leading the discussion, consider using presentation slides. The use of visual cues can help frame the discussion and keep everyone focused. However, do not clutter the slides with a lot of text or graphics--use keywords or phrases because you want the audience to be focused on the discussion, not reading a slide.

ANOTHER NOTE: As a member of the audience, a suggested way to organize your contributions to a class discussion is to start with making small contributions. For example, by agreeing with what someone has said or asking the discussion leader to provide an example or expand on a point they have made. This can help you feel more comfortable being more actively involved in the discussion by directly answering a question put to the group or by providing an example for a point under discussion or disagreeing with what someone and offering an alternative perspective.

PROBLEMS TO AVOID

As the discussion leader , be prepared to confront the following issues that may arise during the discussion:

• Make sure no one dominates the discussion . Do this by inviting and encouraging contributions from all students. As noted above, as the discussion leader, it is important that you encourage an inclusive and equitable space for discussion and debate.
• Make sure audience members do not talk over one another . Be proactive in ensuring that only one member of the audience speaks at a time. Encourage passionate responses, but enforce rules  that encourage civil discussion and that discourage only the most loud are heard. For example, state that you will only respond to raised hands.
• Make sure the discussion does not drift off course . Even if the discussion is focused on examining a particular course reading, a single comment or random thought expressed can lead to the discussion quickly moving off topic. Part of your role as student discussion leader is to refocus everyone on the main topic and ensure that the discussion remains relevant.

Assignment Tip

Should I Wait or Should I Go?

There is a long-standing internal debate that most students have whenever they are asked to volunteer for an in-class assignment-–is it better to wait and learn how others manage the assignment or jump in early and just get it over with? The assumption is that those who volunteer first to lead a class discussion proceed with the least knowledge about how to do it well. On the other hand, waiting until the very end can be stressful and divert attention away from what is being discussed each week as you think more and more about how you will lead the class when it's finally your turn.

The most common answer based on conversations I have had with students is to avoid being among the first couple of students to volunteer while, at the same time, not waiting until the very end to do so. Given this, the best advice may be to volunteer after a few students have already led a class discussion. Ultimately however, you should always decide based on what makes you most comfortable, fits within your overall academic schedule, or the course reading or topic for a specific week is of interest to you regardless of where it falls on the calendar. Note that professors are well aware of these issues and may work around it by assigning students in some type of predetermined order [e.g., alphabetical by last name]. Also note that professors also understand the pressure students experience when they volunteer to go first or last and will  likely take this into account when evaluating how well you have moderated the discussion.

Abdullah, Mohd Yusof, Noor Rahamah Abu Bakar, and Maizatul Haizan Mahbob. "The Dynamics of Student Participation in Classroom: Observation on Level and Forms of Participation." Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences 59 (October 2012): 61-70.

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Eberly Center

Teaching excellence & educational innovation, how can i assess group work.

All of the principles of assessment that apply to individual work apply to group work as well. Assessing group work has added challenges, however. 

First, depending on the objectives of the assignment, the instructor might want to assess the team’s final product (e.g., design, report, presentation), their group processes (e.g., ability to meet deadlines, contribute fairly, communicate effectively), or both. Second, group performance must be translated into individual grades – which raises issues of fairness and equity. Complicating both these issues is the fact that neither group processes nor individual contribution are necessarily apparent in the final product.

Thus, in addition to evaluating the group’s output, instructors may need to find ways to determine how groups functioned and the extent to which individuals contributed to the effort. This isn’t always easy, but these general principles can guide you, and the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence can help you find and implement the right approach for your goals and context.

Assess individual, as well as group, learning and performance.

Assess process as well as product..

• Make your assessment criteria and grading scheme clear .

Find samples of group project assessment tools here...

Diligent students can be profoundly demotivated by group projects if they feel that their own success is dependent on team members who don’t do their share. One way to counteract the motivational hazards of group projects is to assess individual students’ learning and performance in addition to the group’s output. This strategy gives diligent students a greater sense of fairness and control and discourages free ridership. 

Individual learning and performance can be assessed in any number of ways. Some instructors add an individual component to group projects (e.g., a short essay, journal entries); some combine a group project with an individual test or quiz. Both group and individual performance are then reflected in the total project grade (e.g., some faculty members make the group grade worth 50% and the individual grade worth 50%; others split it 80%/20%. There’s no perfect breakdown, but the grading scheme should (a) reflect your goals for student learning and (b) seek to motivate the kind of work you want to see.)

Professor Solomon asks student groups to research a famous anthropological controversy, and give an oral presentation analyzing the issues, positions, and people involved. She assigns a group grade for the presentation, but also requires all the team members to write a short, individual paper summarizing what they learned from the assignment and what they contributed to the team. If the individual piece demonstrates a poor understanding of the material or a low level of participation in the group, she reserves the right to lower the individual’s grade by a full letter grade. If it is particularly informed, thorough, or demonstrates an exceptionally high contribution to the team, she raises the individual’s grade by a full letter grade.

If developing teamwork skills is one of your learning objectives for the course, it’s important to assess students’ progress toward that goal. In other words, you should assess process (how students work) as well as product (the work they produce).

Process can be assessed according to a number of dimensions, such as the ability to generate a range of ideas, listen respectfully to disparate perspectives, distribute work fairly, resolve differences, and communicate effectively. Since instructors don’t always have a direct window into the dynamics of student groups, they often rely on teams to self-report via:

• team evaluations: each member of the team evaluates the dynamics of the team as a whole.
• peer evaluations: each team member evaluates the contributions of his/her teammates. 
• self-evaluations: each team member documents and evaluates his own contributions to the team.
• Find samples of evaluations here...

These assessments can be quantitative or qualitative. They can be done as reflective writing assignments or as questionnaires targeting specific dimensions of teamwork. Think about which tools suit your purpose and context. Also give some thought to when you’ll use them (in the middle of the semester? at the end? both?), who should see them (just you? other team members?), and whether or not they should be anonymous. The Eberly Center can help you find, adapt, or create the right tool and determine how to use it to best effect.

Remember, too, that process assessments are subjective and students are not always straightforward when evaluating one another or themselves. However, in combination with product assessments and individual assessments, they can offer valuable glimpses into how teams function and alert you to major problems (e.g., particularly problematic team members or serious conflict), which can help to inform your feedback and grading.

Professor Montoya assigns a multi-stage information systems project where students work together in teams over much of the semester. Over the course of the semester, he periodically asks students to evaluate both the dynamics of the team as a whole and their own contributions, and to reflect on ways to improve both as the project continues. At the end of the project, he asks students to complete a peer evaluation for every member of their team, indicating each member’s contribution to the group. Professor Montoya’s total grade for the project combines a group grade (75%) and an individual grade (25%). The individual grade is based, in equal parts, on how each student’s teammates evaluated his contribution to the group and on the quality of the feedback he provided to them.

Make your assessment criteria and grading scheme clear.

It’s always important to articulate your performance criteria so students understand your expectations and standards. This is especially true if you are emphasizing skills that are not usually assessed, such as the ability to resolve conflict, delegate tasks, etc. Criteria for evaluating both product and process can be communicated by giving students a group work rubric ( pdf ) before they begin their work and then using it to provide meaningful feedback during and at the end of the project. 

It’s also important to think about how you will weigh the various components of group projects in your grading scheme. Some questions to consider include:

• What percentage of the student’s total project grade will be based on the group’s performance vs. individual components? 
• What percentage will be based on assessments of product vs. assessments of process? 
• How much weight will you give to peer evaluations or self-evaluations? 
• Will feedback from external clients also be incorporated into your assessment of the group’s work? If so, what sorts of feedback will you solicit: feedback on product (e.g., Does it work? Is it a good solution/design?), feedback on process (e.g., Did the group communicate effectively with the client? Did it meet deadlines?), or both?

A number of dimensions of group work can factor, either formally or informally, into a student’s grade. What’s important is to think about what dimensions of student performance matter to you and how your grading criteria and the weighting of assessment components can help motivate the behaviors you want to see. Finally, it’s critical to clearly communicate your grading scheme to students.

• Schools & departments

Assessing assignments

Reflective assignments can be assessed in different ways; below you will find information about summative, formative, peer, and self-assessment of assignments.

Criteria and rubrics can help you in your assessment

As highlighted on the ‘Should I assess?’ page, different levels of assessment will either require or benefit from explicit criteria and rubrics. They will help you in your assessment and will particularly support the reflectors when producing their reflections. Moreover if you decide to use peer or self-assessment, criteria and rubrics will be of great help as part of the guidelines students should be given for the assessment process.

Should I assess? (within the Facilitators’ Toolkit)

Assessment types that work well for reflective assignments

Reflective assignments lend themselves well to most types of assessment.

Classic summative assessment

In contrast to reflective activities, reflective assignments work particularly well for summative assessments that might carry high proportions of the overall course marks. This would be similar to a final essay in a course.

For example, this could be:

• A reflective journal
• A report that pulls on evidence from a reflective journal
• A reflective blog
• A reflective essay on the student’s development in the course
• A reflective essay on meeting benchmark statements
• A reflective essay on a particular experience (for example a critical incident in an experiential learning course)
• A skills-development log

Peer-assessment can be used, but summative assessment might lend itself better to assessment from tutors or course organisers. While it is strictly possible, self-assessment might not suit summative work and it is recommended to use for formative work instead.

Summative assessments are high-stakes assessment. It is therefore important that students receive support on how to reflect and perform well. For instance, having a chance to practice in a low-stakes environment such as formative assessment can be valuable.

Formative assessment

Reflection is an excellent way of checking-in partway through an initiative and supporting students with their further development. Any kind of formative assessment is a valuable way of practising for a summative assignment and therefore smaller or interim versions of final assessments are great for formative feedback.

• Individual entries from a reflective journal
• A reflective blogpost
• Interim essays on development during the course or on benchmark statements
• Drafts on reflective summative assessments
• Reflective workbooks

As mentioned, formative assessment is low-stakes and can be a good way of engaging either peers or students themselves in the assessment process.

For completion or pass/fail

Reflective assignments can easily be implemented ‘for completion’ or ‘pass/fail’. Including reflection ‘for completion’ will ensure that students start the process, but not necessarily engage with it fully. By creating a ‘pass/fail’ option you ensure that students will engage at least to the point of ‘good enough’ with the reflective process.

Types of reflective assignments that can work well ‘for completion’ or ‘pass/fail’:

• Reflective journals/diaries
• Skills-development logs
• Reflective videos/audio recordings

While ‘pass/fail’ of assessment is lower stakes than many other forms of summative assessments and ‘for completion’ is generally very low stakes, you still have the responsibility of ensuring that students have enough information on how to complete the assignment satisfactorily. For ‘pass/fail’, just like any other summative assessment, it means having both criteria and a rubric.

When assessing reflective assignments it is essential to have clear guidelines and criteria. The higher the stakes of the assessment (for example summative versus formative), the more important clear guidelines and rubrics become.

You can use both formative and summative assessment for reflective assignments.  When posing a summative assessments it is important to allow students to practise or you must be extremely clear about what you want and provide detailed guidance.

Reflective assignments lend themselves better to summative assessment than activities do.

Where next?

To get a sense of typical assessment criteria to include when assessing reflection, head to the assessment criteria page. For sample rubrics, see the rubrics page.

Assessment criteria (within the Facilitators’ Toolkit)

Assessment rubrics (within the Facilitators’ Toolkit)

• Assess learning outcomes in rubric criteria
• Assess student work against learning outcomes
• Classic Content experience
• Create competencies and learning objectives
• Create course content with the Content tool
• Get comfortable with Brightspace
• Manage course components
• Teacher Documentation (K12)
• Use Brightspace Portfolio for K-12
• Using Passcards
• Assess assignment submissions
• Associate competencies with learning objectives
• Collect evidence of learning with Brightspace Portfolio
• Create course content with Brightspace Editor
• New Content experience (Lessons)
• Overview of tools
• Use widgets in your course
• Using the Brightspace Portfolio app in the classroom
• Ask students to assess themselves
• Assess discussion threads
• Communicate: Engage with your students
• Create course content with Creator+
• Navigate Brightspace and find your course
• Set up standards and learning outcomes
• Add URL links to a course
• Create: Set up your Brightspace course
• Evaluate with course competencies
• Log In to Brightspace
• Managing evidence with categories
• Set up your Grade Book
• Action: Add or create student activities
• Create and manage assignments
• Customize your course navbar
• Track student progress against learning outcomes
• Using SIS Course Merge to manage your courses
• Activate your course
• Evaluate: Assess Student Learning
• Accessibility: Making Learning Accessible to All
• Create a widget-based homepage
• Create and manage quizzes
• Homepage Widget Expansion Pack
• Question Library
• Brightspace Virtual Assistant
• Play video with Media Player
• Manage audio-video content with Media Library
• About Brightspace Editor
• Content experiences
• About Assignments
• About Announcements
• About Awards
• About Quizzes
• About Portfolio
• About Question Library
• About Rubrics
• About Discussions
• About Grades
• About Classlist
• About Class Progress
• About Media Library
• About Calendar
• About D2L Lumi Pro for Brightspace
• About Consumption Dashboard
• Review your Classlist
• Email others using the Email tool
• Create a welcome message using the Announcements widget
• Set up the Activity Feed widget and post
• Post assignments using the Activity Feed widget
• Control commenting on Activity Feed posts
• Create and manage awards
• Manage locations
• Create discussion forums and topics
• Generate ideas for discussions using D2L Lumi Idea
• Create and manage seating charts
• Manage course events with the Calendar tool
• Brightspace Parent & Guardian Web Application - Teacher Tip Sheet
• Brightspace Parent & Guardian Mobile App - Teacher Tip Sheet
• About course administration
• About Import/Export/Copy Components
• Import, export, or copy course components
• About SIS Course Merge
• Merging and unmerging courses using SIS Course Merge
• View your course using a different role
• About Learning Outcomes
• Add or import standards
• Best practices for creating a Course Homepage
• Align learning outcomes to course content and activities
• Manage widgets on your homepage
• Displaying course grouping tabs in the My Courses widget
• Change personal settings with the My Settings widget
• Using the My Org Units widget
• Using the Photo Banner Widget
• Using the Slim Announcements Widget
• Using the Visual Table of Contents (TOC) Widget
• Using the Welcome Window Widget
• Automatically customize course content using replace strings
• Create and delete grade categories and items
• Gradebook icons and notifications
• Change content display settings
• Add and organize learning materials in the Classic Content experience
• Associate course content with Standards
• Set a course timeframe
• ReadSpeaker integrations for Lessons
• Add and organize learning materials in the New Content Experience (Lessons)
• Improve navigation in multi-page content topics
• Hide Content topics, modules, and downloads
• What types of files can I use for course content?
• Add availability and due dates in Content
• Add a Release Condition to Content
• Manage Rubrics through the Quicklinks menu
• Use HTML templates in Content
• Add a learning objective to a content topic
• Insert and edit images with Brightspace Editor
• Create and insert a video note in Brightspace Editor
• About Brightspace Creator+
• Create a presentation with Capture Web
• Insert and edit equations with Equation Editor
• Create a presentation with the Capture App
• Using the Creator+ features of Brightspace Editor
• Create and delete a link or link category
• Fix broken links in Content
• Add and Edit categories to manage assignments
• Copy an existing assignment
• Copy assignments to other courses
• Create an assignment
• Generate assignment ideas using D2L Lumi Idea
• Hide draft assignments and content
• Reorder, edit, and delete assignments and categories
• Align learning outcomes to assignments
• Preview assignments in Evaluation mode
• Set release conditions and special access in Assignments
• Set availability and due dates for an assignment
• Restricted File Extensions
• Assignments and Turnitin
• About anonymous marking
• Create and configure a quiz
• Applying Respondus LockDown Browser to a quiz
• Manage questions in the Quiz Builder
• Quizzes FAQ: Hot tips and workarounds
• Creating Question Library questions
• Manage quiz questions
• Managing questions in Question Library
• Quizzes and Question Library
• Delete and copy questions from Question Library in a quiz
• Add existing activities with Google Drive
• Add existing activities with OneDrive
• Generate quiz questions using D2L Lumi Question
• Using Virtual Classrooms and Video Assignments by Bongo
• Create and manage release conditions
• Upload, edit, and play audio-video content with Media Player
• View and download audio-video transcripts
• About Release Conditions
• Unspecified
• Import and manage SCORM
• View user progress in Content
• Create a rubric using the Rubrics tool
• View quiz statistics and attempt logs
• Evaluate with Quick Eval
• Manage quizzes with learner attempts
• Evaluate quizzes
• Define Portfolio class settings
• Filter classlists by section
• Evaluate assignments using the Assignments tool
• Ideas for using Brightspace Portfolio in K-12 organizations
• Set up the Brightspace Portfolio app
• Synchronize multi-evaluator grades between Grade Book and Assignments
• Use Passcards
• Manage evidence
• Manage categories
• Share evidence with parents or guardians
• Perform bulk actions on evidence
• Spotlight evidence
• Manually map achievement levels to Rubric levels
• Reviewing suggested achievement outcomes
• Review and assess submitted Portfolio evidence
• Reviewing suggested achievement levels
• Assessing assignment submissions
• Assessing assignment submissions against standards
• Assessing discussion threads
• Assessing discussion topic responses against a learning objective

Assess users in discussion threads

• Review and assess submitted evidence
• Creating and editing competencies, learning objectives, and activities
• Understanding competency status settings
• Create a competency
• Modify an approved competency
• Copy a competency
• Create a learning objective
• Delete a competency
• Types of activities
• Associating activities
• How an automatic evaluation is initiated
• Allow automatic competency evaluation after a user achieves a competency
• Delete a learning objective
• Copy a learning objective
• Turn off automatic competency evaluation
• Manually initiate an evaluation
• Evaluate quiz activity manually
• Evaluate grade item activity manually
• Understanding competency structures and associations
• Associate a competency structure element with another existing element
• Evaluate survey activities
• Associate a learning objective with an activity
• Associate a learning objective with a grade item
• Associate a learning objective with an assignment
• Remove an association between competency structure elements
• Remove associations between a learning objective and an activity from another tool area
• Associate an independent learning objective or activity to a parent element
• Override a user's result
• Assess Quiz submissions against standards
• View competency structure results
• Share a competency structure
• Displaying rubric scores on the Assess Topic page
• View course progress against Standards
• View assessment details on the Outcomes Progress details page
• View student achievement for multiple quiz attempts
• Allow students to reflect on their learning
• Reasons to use self assessments
• Evaluating self assessments
• Create a self assessment
• Manage final grades
• Create accessible content in Brightspace
• Delete a self assessment
• Drop the lowest grade
• Access course content using the ReadSpeaker docReader integration
• Share self assessment questions with other instructors
• Glossary of Terms
• Glossary of Icons
• Documentation changes for K12 teachers

You can assess learners' participation in discussion topics from within threads for topics to which you've added an assessment. In the Assess Post pop-up, you can view the post you are assessing, along with any attached rubrics and fields to add in personal feedback.

If your topic is moderated, you must approve posts before you can assess them. To assess individual posts, you must edit the topic to enable the Allow assessment of individual posts check box in the Assessment tab.

To assess users in discussion threads

• From Course Admin , click Discussions .
• On the Discussions List page, click the topic you want to assess.
• In Reading view, instructors can assess an individual learner while viewing all of a learner's posts together on one screen. Click the context menu beside a thread name and select Assess Student .
• In Grid view, instructors can select either the thread or reply for a post. Click the More Actions button and then select Assess to assess the individual learner.
• If assessment of individual posts is enabled and you are in Reading View, enter a score in the Score column beside each post you want to assess. If assessment of individual posts is enabled and you are in Grid View, add the assessment in the Post Score field.
• If assessment of individual posts is not enabled, enter a score in the Topic Score field. This score is the assessment you are providing to the learner for participation in the topic.
• Complete each rubric by choosing a level and entering feedback for each criterion. The Total calculates automatically based on the rubric criteria, or you can manually enter the Total and override the calculation. Note that the calculated or chosen Total is automatically populated in the Topic Score field. To return the Topic Score to the calculated score from the rubric, click Clear Override .
• If learning outcomes are aligned to the discussion topic, using the scale defined by an administrator, assess the learner's progress against each learning outcome. For example, achievement levels might include the following: Does Not Meet Expectations, Meets Expectations, and Exceeds Expectations.
• In the General Feedback field, enter feedback comments.
• Click Save Draft to retain the assessment results and publish later. Click Publish to immediately release the assessment results to the learner in Assignments , Discussions , Grades , Content , and User Progress simultaneously.

Video: Assess from Within a Thread

Video: grade a discussion topic.