There is considerable evidence showing that assessment drives student learning. More than anything else, our assessment tools tell students what we consider to be important. They will learn what we guide them to learn through our assessments.

Assessment is more than grades To many, the word "assessment" simply means the process by which we assign students grades. Assessment is much more than this, however. Assessment is a mechanism for providing instructors with data for improving their teaching methods and for guiding and motivating students to be actively involved in their own learning. As such, assessment provides important feedback to both instructors and students. Assessment is Feedback for Both Instructors and Students Assessment gives us essential information about what our students are learning and about the extent to which we are meeting our teaching goals. But the true power of assessment comes in also using it to give feedback to our students. Improving the quality of learning in our courses involves not just determining to what extent students have mastered course content at the end of the course; improving the quality of learning also involves determining to what extent students are mastering content throughout the course.

Assessment Drives Student Learning The types of assessment usually performed in first-year science, math, engineering, and technology (STEM) courses--giving students tests--merely inform students about their grade, or ranking, after they have received instruction. In addition, these common testing techniques--which typically test for fact-based knowledge and algorithmic problem solving--tell our students that this is the type of knowledge we think is most important. That is, we appear to value the understanding of concepts at a relatively low level. Given that this is the type of assessment our students most frequently encounter, and that it will eventually lead to their final course grades, students learn to study the content in our courses in an expeditious way that allows them to succeed in passing many first-year STEM courses without necessarily developing deep understanding of concepts. It is our assessment that drives students learning.

There is considerable evidence showing that assessment drives student learning. More than anything else, our assessment tools tell students what we consider to be important. They will learn what we guide them to learn through our assessments.

Our findings support the theory that retrieval practice enhances learning by retrieval-specific mechanisms rather than by elaborative study processes. Retrieval practice is an effective tool to promote conceptual learning about science.

students who read a passage, then took a test asking them to recall what they had read, retained about 50 percent more of the information a week later than students who used two other methods.

the illusion that they know material better than they do.

“I think that learning is all about retrieving, all about reconstructing our knowledge,” said the lead author, Jeffrey Karpicke, an assistant professor of psychology at Purdue University. “I think that we’re tapping into something fundamental about how the mind works when we talk about retrieval.”