During my second year as an educator, I came to a startling realization: despite the plethora of quizzes, tests, projects, and presentations I was assigning, I couldn't definitively say whether my students were truly learning. The accumulation of points that translated into final grades seemed to lack clarity in terms of their reflection of actual learning.

This epiphany marked the beginning of a significant transformation in my teaching practices, leading me to reevaluate and revamp my assessment and grading methods. Initially, the transition to a standards-based grading system seemed daunting, but my personal experiences and research on its positive effects on student motivation and mental health convinced me of its potential, despite the inconclusive evidence on its impact on learning outcomes. Moreover, I discovered that minor adjustments in assessment design could provide clearer insights into what students had mastered and what areas required further attention.

Crafting Purposeful Multiple-Choice Questions

While multiple-choice questions are often criticized in educational assessment, they can be invaluable for learning when crafted with care, especially for formative assessment and practice. The key lies in the design of the incorrect options.

In the early stages of my journey, I believed that creating multiple-choice questions required a stem, a correct answer, and plausible incorrect answers. I would compile quizzes with 10 questions and provide students with their scores, thinking this would offer them actionable feedback. However, I later realized this approach was flawed.

Instead, I now focus on creating one or two questions, with each incorrect option deliberately crafted to reveal a common misconception. These questions are more challenging to construct individually, but by limiting the number, I maintain a similar workload while gaining more insightful feedback.

Here's an illustrative example:

Identify the punctuation error in the following sentence and select the option that corrects it: "My brother and I left our lunches and bags on the bus so we left school and walked to the bus garage to get our food."

A. My brother, and I left our lunches and bags on the bus so we left school and walked to the bus garage to get our food.

B. My brother and I left our lunches, and bags on the bus so we left school and walked to the bus garage to get our food.

C. My brother and I left our lunches and bags on the bus, so we left school and walked to the bus garage to get our food.

D. My brother and I left our lunches and bags on the bus so we left school, and walked to the bus garage to get our food.

Each incorrect option highlights a different misunderstanding: Option A points to a confusion about compound subjects, B to compound objects, and D to compound verbs and phrases.

The strategy is to anticipate common student misconceptions and design incorrect answers that expose these areas of confusion. The number of options may vary, but the goal is to create as many incorrect answers as necessary to address potential misunderstandings.

Students can leverage this feedback to determine their next learning steps. I provide a document with links to instructional videos targeting these misconceptions, allowing students to immediately engage with the material they need to master.

Developing Assessment Blueprints

How does this strategy scale up to a comprehensive test? Assessment blueprints serve as a roadmap of the learning objectives targeted by each question. These are particularly useful for assessments tied to a curriculum, as they enable me to identify the focus of each question intentionally. Here are three examples of what these assessment blueprints might look like.

This approach doesn't alter the assessment itself but creates opportunities to use the results to facilitate further learning by showing students how the questions relate to the concepts they've been studying.

For instance, if questions 1, 3, and 5 all pertain to the same concept, a student who struggles with these questions can pinpoint the area for concentrated effort. After analyzing the results, students can identify the specific concept or two they need to work on, and I can offer resources and activities, sometimes forming small groups to focus on particular concepts to reengage students in the learning process.

My aim was to ensure that students grappling with a concept didn't have to endure a vague sense of inadequacy but instead received concrete information to guide their future growth.

Structuring Assessments Around Learning Progressions

The assessment blueprint aligns existing assessments with