Learning objectives chart the destinations on your trail. They tell learners where they’re headed and what it means to arrive. But reaching those destinations requires clear markers along the way. In OER design, practices and review (formative assessments) act as campsites with trail markers and progress checkpoints, helping learners gauge how far they’ve come and what lies ahead. Final (Summative) assessments, whether in the OER or your course, are like hiker logbooks at the summit: places where learners demonstrate they’ve reached their goal and leave a record of their achievement. Without these markers, even the most scenic destination can feel out of reach.
Charting Your Route: Mapping and Planning
Assessment Mapping
Learning Objectives
By the end of this chapter, you will be able to
- Identify objective-aligned (summative) assessments
- Identify objective-aligned interactive practice or review (formative assessments)
Setting Trail Markers to the Summit
Checkpoints along the route help confirm that travelers are still on track.
Why This Matters
Aligning your objectives with your assessments (both checkpoints and final summits) not only helps learners stay oriented, it also reduces confusion and builds motivation[1][2]. When content is introduced, students need clear opportunities to apply it, connect it to what they already know[3], and receive timely feedback[4]. Without alignment between objectives, activities, and assessments, learners can become disoriented and disengaged, and taking the time to map out that alignment makes all the difference.
Assessment Types: Campsites and Summits
In the previous chapter, you identified the scope of your OER using your course outcomes and what you wanted your students to be able to do by the end of each chapter (your measurable, student-centered learning objectives). Your objectives tell you what the final (summative) assessment will be and give cues to what practice (formative) assessments might be.
The second stage of Backward Design[5] is to determine what evidence you will accept to show that learners reached those objectives. Showing evidence or measurement of an objective is done through an assessment, and there are two kinds of assessments.
1. Final (Summative) assessments – These measure students’ learning on larger, culminating objectives. They are usually found in your course, and they are usually graded.
Metaphor: public logbooks at a trail’s end, where hikers can register their arrival
Examples: high-stakes exams, final papers, presentations, created products (in course) or final H5P activities connected to your course gradebook (in OER)
2. Practice or Review (Formative) assessments – Scaffolded to build toward the summative assessment, these prepare the learners by offering opportunities to pause and review, think deeper, build skills or vocabulary, and build confidence before the final assessment. They can be found in either your course or in your OER, and they are not usually graded or, if they are graded, they are low-stakes.
Metaphor: campsites and trail signs along the trail
Examples: low-stakes review quizzes, memorization of key facts, interactive practice, reflection, discussion
Step 1: Mapping to the Summit: Aligning with Final (Summative) Assessments
Following Backward Design ensures your objectives align with your final assessments and helps avoid scope creep in your OER and your course. This helps both the OER architect and the learner. During the designing of your OER, aligned objectives and assessments help you map out exactly what needs to be assessed by the end of the chapter, unit, or course. During the learning, aligned objectives and assessments help reduce confusion and overwhelm and build trust for your students, as the objectives tell them right away the things on which they will be tested, and the assessment measures exactly that objective. Ensuring alignment is easy to do – the objectives tell you what the summative assessment will be.
Select the arrow to see an example of alignment.
Decoding the Assessment’s Action
This example shows how the learning objective tells us (aligns with) the final (summative) assessment.
Learning objective: By the end of this module, students will be able to….
Identify five persuasive writing strategies
- The action verb “identify” tells me what the student will need to do to show they have reached the objective.
- The rest of the objective, “five persuasive writing strategies,” tells me the context.
Knowing that the student needs to “identify” allows the instructor to decide how they want the student to “identify” these strategies. Here are some possible options for final assessments for the learning objective above:
Possible Final (Summative) Assessments: Students will identify 5 persuasive writing strategies by…
- listing the 5 strategies from memory.
- looking at a group of videos and identifying which video is using which strategy.
- writing a paragraph that includes listing the 5 strategies.
How you have students reach this assessment is up to you, but any of them could be used to reach this objective.
Find Your Footing: Camp out and Review
Pause here and get your bearings. Use this interactive practice to measure this chapter’s first objective:
- Identify objective-aligned (summative) assessments
You might be wondering why you are being asked to map the final (summative) assessments if it likely won’t be included in your OER. In order to identify the best practice (formative) and interactive experiences a learner will need, we have to first identify the ultimate goal for which they are practicing – the final (summative) assessment.
Step 2: Mapping the Trail Markers: Aligning and Scaffolding Practice (Formative) Assessments
Imagine starting a three-day hike to the summit of a beautiful mountain. You’re given a map with your starting point at the trailhead and the end point at the summit of the mountain, but no other guidance about places to rest, camp, or the distance between stops along the way. You’d be rightly concerned about getting lost or being in danger, and you may end up choosing a different trail altogether. In the same way, if the learning objective is the starting point (trailhead) and the final (summative) assessment is the end point (summit), how will you ensure your learners stay on track and prepare for the final assessment in your OER?
The third stage of Backward Design is to plan the learning experiences that will scaffold toward the final assessment. The gap between the learning objective and the summative assessment gives us opportunities to consider all sorts of practices, review, and interactivity that might be needed along the way.
Select the arrow to see an example of alignment.
Alignment Example
This example shows how the learning objective tells us (aligns with) the final (summative) assessment.
Learning objective: By the end of this module, students will be able to….
Identify five persuasive writing strategies
Final (Summative) Assessment: Students will look at a group of videos and identify which video is using which strategy.
Given the learning objective and summative assessment above, ask yourself:
“What does my student need to practice or interact with to prepare them for that summative assessment?”
Possible Practice/Review (Formative) Assessments:
-
- List: Students list the five strategies.
- Multiple Answer: From a list that includes the five strategies and three distractors, the student chooses the five strategies.
- Multiple Choice: Students are given a written, audio, or video example, and they choose which of the five strategies is being used in the example.
Do you see the alignment of the objective and both types of assessments? That’s design in action, and that’s what ensures your learner succeeds.
Note: While any or all of these possible practice/review assessments could be placed in your OER along the way to the final assessment, #3 could also serve as the final assessment. The first two or all three scaffold (get progressively harder) toward the final objective, just like a trail architect lays the trail out to progress from easy to more challenging toward the summit.
Find Your Footing: Check Your Trail Marker
Pause here and get your bearings. Use this interactive practice to measure this chapter’s second objective:
- Identify objective-aligned interactive practice or review (formative assessments)
A Note About Interactivity
Though you’ll create or develop your interactive formative assessments for your OER later, while you are in the design phase, it’s a good idea to see what types of interactive practice and content are available for your future OER. In Pressbooks, you can build interactive practice and content using a tool called H5P, which is freely available in Pressbooks. The Outfitting Your Pack: Tools and Interactivity section gives guidance and a look book for you to play with different H5P types you might consider using in your OER as well as other embeddable interactives.
Interactivity in your OER may or may not be considered formative assessment.
- If it allows practice with feedback and aligns with your objectives, it is considered formative assessment. That’s what we are mapping in this chapter. (See H5P for Formative Assessment)
- If it allows deeper understanding of the context of the learning objective but is not assessed with feedback, it is considered interactive content. (See H5P for Presenting Your Content)
Both are important and useful in your OER, but they are mapped in different areas and for different purposes.
Your Turn: Mapping Your Summit and Campsites (Final and Practice/Review Assessments)
Returning to your Map, begin by looking at the Learning Objectives column of your Table of Contents on the left side of the spreadsheet.
Step 1. Align final (summative) assessments to the learning objectives.
List the final (summative) assessment where learners will be tested on each learning objective in the Assessment column.
- Often, several objectives are measured within the same final assessment. You will simply type in those existing final assessments next to every learning objective it measures in your Assessment column.
- If you are creating an OER for an existing course, you may already have your final assessments planned and created (high-stakes exams, final papers, presentations, etc.). Simply state which one of your existing final assessments measures each objective.
Step 2. Align the practice (formative) assessments with the learning objectives and final (summative) assessments.
In the Practice/Review column, for each learning objective listed in the Learning Objectives column, list some possible formative assessments and interactivities that would help your learners prepare for the summative assessments.
If possible, state
- the type of interactivity
- “H5P Multiple Answer…”
- where you plan to place it in your OER
- “…placed just after learning about the five persuasive writing strategies”
- what the prompt for the interaction might be
- “Chooses the five strategies of persuasive writing.”
Though you may not use all these formative assessments in your OER, thinking through them now will save you time when you are building these assessments in your OER chapters.
Step 3. Locate examples.
Look through the Outfitting Your Pack: Tools and Interactivity section to find examples of tools and interactives that would support your formative assessments and interactivity you listed in the Practice/Review column. In the Links column, add some examples of H5P or other interactivity that might work for your purpose. These examples will help remind you down the road when it is time to build the interactivity.
Co-creating assessment with students
Prof. Rajiv Jhangiani wanted his students to develop a deeper knowledge of social psychology than a multiple-choice test would foster. His answer was to have his students write test questions. Students gradually increasing their content knowledge and learned to formulate multiple-choice questions, submitting four every week. Jhangiani effectively modified his summative assessment for weekly formative assessments that could be used for the summative assessment!
Reflect on how students might learn more by creating assessments. This may involve glowing up your OER with interactive H5P elements. The H5P elements you see in this OER are easy to make and easily shared with a link. The possibilities are endless and may help you scale and scaffold some of your assessment pieces. For more ideas and information, see Hiking Together: Open Pedagogy.
You have now identified what types of assessments and interactive practice you need for all parts of your OER, where you plan to place those assessments and interactivities within your OER, and examples of or links to the interactivity itself. Next, you will begin to consider and gather images, figures, and videos you may use in your OER.
- Sweller, J., Ayres, P., & Kalyuga, S. (2011). Cognitive Load Theory. New York, NY: Springer ↵
- Biggs, J., & Tang, C. (2011). Teaching for Quality Learning at University (4th ed.). Open University Press. ↵
- Merrill, M. D. (2012). First principles of instruction. John Wiley & Sons. ↵
- Gagné, R.M. (1965). The conditions of learning. New York: Holt, Reinhart & Winston. ↵
- Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design. ASCD. ↵
definition
the tendency to add "just one more thing" to content, expanding beyond agreed upon boundaries (course outcomes and stated objectives)
