Learning outcomes and assessment tasks

Review your subject's learning outcomes and assessment tasks and ask yourself:

Do assessment tasks give students an opportunity to show they have met the subject's learning outcomes?
Do the learning outcomes articulate the knowledge, skills and application to be learned in the subject? An easy way to do this is to create a table with a column for the outcome and one each for the skills, knowledge and application.

This example below demonstrates how the breakdown of the outcome into skills, knowledge and application might look.

Subject Learning Outcome	Skills	Knowledge/Topics	Application to practice
be able to design and review assessment tasks that align with subject and course learning outcomes, enhance student learning and promote academic integrity	analyse, design, research, develop arguments	know about: taxonomies, design process, valid research in learning design,	application to own professional practice
be able to justify their practices with reference to scholarly literature and CSU policies.	identify valid literature, conduct searches, cite in-text and in bibliography,	taxonomies, design processes, valid research in learning designings	relate the literature to their own practice

A tip on checking whether all subject learning outcomes have been covered by assessment in the subject is to:

Copy learning outcomes into a Word document
For each task check the rationale for the subject outcomes that have been linked and highlight the learning outcomes in your Word document
Then check the task – can you see that this learning outcome is covered by the task? If so, cross it out in the Word document
Repeat for each task in the subject outline.

Once you are happy that the assessment tasks reflect the subject's learning outcomes, you can start developing your marking criteria.