Assessment practices should be aligned to intended learning outcomes and teaching/learning activities (Biggs, 1999).
Assessment practices include various forms of activities that instructors use to gather information about the extent to which students have achieved the intended learning outcomes. Graded assessments are oftentimes used to sum up and evaluate students’ performance. Instructors can also use ungraded assessments to gauge students’ learning progress, which can help instructors and students take informed actions to improve teaching and learning to meet the learning outcomes (Brown & Knight, 2012).
Whether a task meets its intended purpose is a key consideration in all assessment practices. For example, using multiple-choice questions to check students’ understanding of a topic during teaching may meet the intended purpose of identifying and clarifying students' misconceptions in time. However, using a short multiple-choice test is inadequate, if the purpose is to measure students’ competency in solving a complex problem in the real-world setting.