Exams can be useful tools for measuring student learning, both at the course and the program level. For program assessment, they can be used at the start of a program to find out what students already know, at the middle to measure growth and pinpoint areas that need more focus, and at the end to determine the extent of students' learning over the entire course of the program.
In addition to measuring learning, exams help to reinforce learning in three key ways:
1) Prompting practice: Students will study for exams, helping ensure that they understand the material.
2) Testing effect: The act of taking an exam on studied material has been shown to lead to better longer-term retention of that material.1,2
3) Feedback: Exams can be used to give students feedback about their performance, which helps them understand their own learning.
This resource is designed to help you create exams to measure and reinforce learning outcomes, with particular emphasis on using exams for program assessment and designing exams that measure students’ knowledge of material covered by learning outcomes - as opposed to their ability to use logic or knowledge about the structure of exams (known as test-taking ability) to answer questions correctly.
Click on the links below to learn about exam design topics:
- Planning Your Exam
- Tips for Writing an Effective Exam
- Types of Exam Items
- Testing for Depths of Understanding
- Using Exams for Program Assessment
- Additional Resources
2 Karpicke, J. D. (2017). Retrieval-Based Learning: A Decade of Progress. Grantee Submission.