Direct Measurement

There are many ways to measure student learning.  Two categories of measurement (or assessment) are “direct” and “indirect.”  As the terms suggest, whether a measurement is direct or indirect depends on whether you are judging work produced by the student.  Most class activities such as exams, essays, assignments, and projects are direct, while student reflections, national surveys, and other institutional data are indirect.

What’s the difference?  Direct measurement means that you can directly see whether the student met a learning outcome in a document (or recording or performance or clinical behavior) produced by the student, while indirect measurement only suggests (without certainty) that a learning outcome was achieved.  Because of this, direct measures are usually more compelling and more persuasive evidence of student learning.  However, they are more difficult standardize, and the require a lot of planning to be effective.

A direct measure means you can see evidence of student learning in an “artifact” (a document or project) produced by the student.  Because of this, direct measures often provide more compelling and persuasive evidence of student learning.

Direct methods of assessment measure student learning through documents and projects produced by students; these are often called “artifacts.”  They include:

Quizzes and Exams:  Reading and vocabulary quizzes, chapter exams, and final exams.

Licensing Exams.  Many programs have college entrance exams and state or national licensing exams, such as the ACT or SAT for college, the GRE for graduate school, the MCAT for medical school, the LSAT for law school, the GMAT for business school, the NCLEX for Nursing, Boards (USMLE) for Medicine, the Bar Exam for Law, the CPA Exam for Accounting, Series 6 for Finance and Insurance, and many more.  These exams objectively and directly measure student learning, so they are direct assessment methods.  Unfortunately, because of copyright and security concerns, these exams often don’t provide specific student performance information about individual students, so the overall score may not be very informative.  Nevertheless, many academic programs use the licensing exam as an indicator of program effectiveness and student preparedness.  Many schools also use licensing exam scores in their marketing and recruiting material (example:  96% of our law school graduates pass the Bar Exam), and program accrediting agencies may impose minimum pass rates.

Essays, Reports, and other Written Projects:  These include essays, lab reports, research papers or reports, analysis or argumentation essays, business proposals, financial statements or reports, and other documents.

Oral Presentations:  These include speeches, group oral presentations, a fine arts performance such as a vocal or a performance.

Fine Arts Projects:  A recorded song, a musical or theatrical performance, a podcast, an artwork such as a piece of pottery or a painting.

Skills Demonstration:  A clinical skill in a Nursing or Medicine course or a laboratory skill in a Chemistry or Biology class.

Other Discipline-Specific Assignments:  Any other assignment or project that students complete as part of class and is unique and meaningful for that discipline.  These can include a computer program or computer code, a 3-D design in an Engineering class, a service-learning project, and so on.

These artifacts can be assessed in two ways.  One way is to assess them as part of the class.  In this instance, the course instructor grades the assignment as usual, and one of the grading criteria is used as evidence of student learning.  For example, when grading essays, the instructor could keep track of how students perform on the criteria of “accuracy of writing” or “citation of outside sources.”  Student performance scores on this criteria of the grading rubric could be used both as part of the overall grade for the assignment and as evidence for a student learning outcome.  (This approach is called a “course embedded” assessment.)

A second way to assess student artifacts is to score them again outside of class (by using the same or a different rubric).  In this case, artifacts would be collected, distributed to graders, and scored on a rubric.  This approach is most useful when artifacts are collected from multiple courses.  It provides consistency in grading and measures student artifacts on the same criteria.

In a future post, I will define and give examples of Indirect Measures.  Submit your email in the “Follow” box to receive alerts about new posts from this blog.

Lirim Neziroski, Ph.D., MBA is an academic leader and an assessment and technology expert at a liberal arts university in the Chicago area. Contact Lirim directly for additional resources and speaking, consulting, and writing opportunities.