2

Clear, authentic assessments enhance student learning and allow both faculty and students to better track learning, while equitable grading practices honor the significance of grades in students’ educational experience.

Picking up where we left off in the course design/refinement process outlined in Unit 1, this unit focuses on the equity-minded principle of transparency. After you develop more relevant and rigorous course learning objectives, it’s essential that you ensure that your main assessments—whether they’re tests, essays, projects, portfolios, and so on—are also relevant, rigorous, and well aligned with your learning objectives. These assessments represent your and your students’ main sources of data regarding their learning growth. (Equity-minded faculty also consistently use student assessment data to reflect on and refine their practice; see Section Three.) Because assessment research is vast and can be quite jargon-ridden, this unit focuses on three important characteristics of inclusive assessments: purpose, authenticity, and transparency.

Given the significant impact of grades on student learning and success, we also distill research on equitable grading. Grading can feel much more personal than other course design and instructional practices, so much so that grading practices are often left out of professional development opportunities for faculty. Yet, as the research summary in the following pages will demonstrate, grades bear significantly on student learning and success, particularly for students from minoritized groups. After we discuss the research on inclusive assessments, we’ll turn to implementation, revisiting the course design process introduced in Unit 1 and suggesting how to identify your primary assessments and create an equitable grading scheme in any modality.