Creating Quality Assessments

Assessment is at the heart of student learning. Whether formative or summative, assessments must be thoughtfully designed to support and demonstrate achievement of intended learning outcomes. Digital tools can enhance this process by improving clarity, accessibility, variety, and student engagement. The following strategies highlight how digital approaches can support inclusive and meaningful assessment practice.

Tips for creating quality assessments

Authentic Assessment

Authentic assessment engages students in tasks that reflect real-world challenges or professional practices, helping them develop skills that are directly transferable beyond the classroom. When designing assessments, it’s important to ensure constructive alignment: learning outcomes, teaching activities, and assessment tasks should all support one another.

This means that the knowledge and skills you expect students to demonstrate are clearly reflected in both the activities they undertake and the way their work is assessed. Authentic assessment can take many forms, from case studies and simulations to projects, presentations, or problem-solving exercises, providing meaningful opportunities for students to apply their learning in relevant contexts. The Curriculum and Education Development Academy (CEDA) have Assessment Design Guidance which covers all aspects of meaningful assessment. For more information on designing effective assessment, please view the section in the Assessment & Feedback in Moodle course.

Align assessment with Learning Outcomes

Effective assessment begins with constructive alignment (Biggs & Tang, 2007). This means ensuring your tasks directly measure the intended learning outcomes and programme-level outcomes. Choosing formats that reflect the skills you want students to demonstrate—such as case studies or video presentations for critical analysis—strengthens relevance and fairness. Linking marking criteria explicitly to learning outcomes also improves transparency and helps students understand what is expected.

Be clear on expectations

Clarity reduces stress and supports digital wellbeing for students. Always state the required submission format, whether that is a video, PDF or audio file and make deadlines and support routes visible. A short video or screencast explaining the assignment can go a long way in reducing ambiguity and giving students confidence.

Design inclusive and accessible assessments

Assessments should enable all students to demonstrate their potential without unnecessary barriers. When designing tasks, consider in advance what is fixed and what is flexible what knowledge, skills, or competencies are being assessed, and what aspects of format or presentation can be adapted. Use accessible materials, such as structured Word documents or captioned videos, and plan for inclusive design so that many adjustments are built in from the start, rather than applied reactively.

For students with Inclusive Learning and Support Plans (ILSPs), reasonable adjustments may still be required, but proactive inclusive design can reduce the need for on-the-fly adaptations. For guidance and examples, including case studies, see the University Wellbeing services resources and the CEDA Inclusive by Design training.

Use Moodle to support assessment workflows

Moodle provides a flexible platform for setting, collecting, and marking a wide range of assessments. The Assignment tool can manage both document and multimedia submissions, with rubrics or marking guides applied for clear, criteria-based feedback. Features such as group submissions, Turnitin integration and anonymous marking, streamline processes while supporting consistency and fairness. For more in depth information on how to use Workflows in Moodle, go to Assessment & Feedback in Moodle training course.

Build in Formative Assessment

Formative tasks help students develop skills, confidence, and assessment literacy throughout the year. Moodle quizzes or H5P activities can be used to check understanding after lectures, while quiz questions embedded in recorded content or polls during live sessions keep learning active. Forums and short reflective tasks also provide valuable opportunities for feedback and practice.

Embrace Variety and Collaboration

Offering a range of assessment formats can help students develop different strengths and build broader graduate attributes, but these should be carefully integrated across the programme rather than introduced in isolation.

Multimedia options such as podcasts, posters, or videos can be effective when aligned with intended learning outcomes and supported with clear guidance and examples, allowing students to develop these skills progressively over multiple modules. Using digital systems like Moodle and LUSI can further support consistency in deadlines, expectations, and communication, and facilitate collaboration between academic and professional staff. Including opportunities for digital assessment also helps students prepare for a rapidly evolving landscape, including working with technologies like generative AI, while formative examples such as digital posters on MS Whiteboard demonstrate how achievable and engaging these tasks can be when structured appropriately.

A research poster presentation can be an effective way of developing students’ confidence and ability to synthesise information and communicate it in a varied way.

Poster presentations develop the students’ ability to match the explanation and content to the audience, which is an important graduate skill.

Creating a research poster involves a rich learning experience as the research poster is a highly condensed version of a full research paper; utilizing visual displays and enough supporting text to convey complex ideas and/or findings.

Solution

Posters are screen-based, paper-based, or virtual objects which represent ideas and / or research findings. A range of institutional tools (PowerPoint, Publisher, Visio, Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop) can be effectively used to support students in the creation of research posters, with PowerPoint being a versatile and common selection.

Set the assessment in Moodle.
Optionally, share some example posters – you can check for accessibility when uploaded into Moodle using Ally or using the accessibility checklists.
If needed, share the Preparing Academic Posters using PowerPoint training with students.

Notes

Framing the assessment correctly is important to ensure that students understand and engage in the process, not just the product. Focus on the requirement of the independent research and the need to align to the target audience, opposed to just ‘create a poster’.
An associated rubric or marking criteria could focus on:
- Content
- Research
- Organisation and integration of information
- Formulation of conclusion based on supporting sections
- Aesthetic components
A shift from text heavy essay assessments can be an inclusive move towards offering a range of assessments that take specific learning differences into account.
Having a predefined template and examples to show students can help to highlight the expectations of the task at hand. With this assessment method, it is also an effective way to integrate some low stakes peer assessment and feedback into the curriculum. Students can be given the grading criteria to develop their own understanding of the expectations as they engage and support their peers’ development.