Accessible Assessment: Flexible Assessments & Multiple Pathways

Overview

Flexible assessments offer students choice in how they navigate time, modality and engagement when completing course assessments. When thoughtfully designed and implemented, flexible assessments support students in demonstrating (both to the instructor and themselves) what they have learned without defaulting to traditional assessment practices that do not reflect students’ wholeness or priorities.

"For large assignments like term papers, it's helpful to have a few ‘check in’ due dates where I need to provide an outline/annotated bibliography/etc., this helps me keep on track and organize my ideas to a specific timeline but isn't as demanding or overwhelming as weekly assignments."

Meanwhile, offering multiple assessment pathways (or “choose your own adventure”-style learning) offers students the opportunity to select among multiple pathways to meet course learning outcomes and demonstrate their learning. This approach focuses on providing choice among learning activities and assessments.

Rationale

Accessible presentation style is a way to support learner engagement, learning, and feedback processes by reducing barriers. Done proactively and effectively, accessible presentations can achieve the following:

• Improvement of comprehension, retention, and participation.
• Reduction of cognitive overload during complex lectures.
• Proactively support students who may experience access barriers in the classroom across a variety of positionalities and access needs
• Align with accessibility legislation and human rights frameworks
• Support institutional accommodation policies and equity commitments.
• Reduce the number of retroactive adjustments that are needed.
• Shift responsibility from student advocacy for individual needs to proactive learning material and facilitation design

Slide presentations often rely on an individual’s ability to see what’s being projected and simultaneously process that information, usually while someone is talking. Not everyone in a teaching and learning space will be able to see or process the content on your slides, especially if elements of slide deck design are not thoughtfully considered.

"I struggle with dexterity and writing; if you are going to speed through the slides - please post them for me to review afterwards, as I likely could not keep up with my notetaking. If you refuse to post the slides, then please make sure you proceed at a pace that allows me to write my notes."

Guidance

Flexible Assessments

Flexibility in assessment can take many forms, including flexibility in time, modality, and engagement types:

Time Flexibility

• Flexible deadlines (slip days / grace days; built in; “late days bank”)
  • e.g., building student autonomy through built-in flexible deadline dates for all students – 24 – 48 hours after the due date; or individualized flexibility – late days bank / slip days / grace days – that students can draw on across multiple assignments 

Modality Flexibility

• Choice of assessment topic
  • e.g., select from a proposed list of topics; student-created topics
• Choice of format (assessment genre)
  • e.g., research essay, podcast, presentation, public-facing writing, policy brief, community partnerships, research poster
• Choice of modality (assessment communication mode(s))
  • e.g., written, oral, performance-based
• Co-created assessment
  • e.g., develop the shell of an assessment and then invite students to collaboratively refine it; co-create an assessment from nothing; collaborate on determining a rubric or criteria for success

Engagement Flexibility

• Choice of assessment pathways
  • e.g., engaging with community partners or completing assessments within the classroom community
• Choice in group or individual work (to minimize unwanted disclosure of disability or neurodivergence to other students for the purposes of accommodation)
  • e.g., invite students to share their preference: individual work, self-selected group, instructor-selected group
• Option to drop lowest assessment(s)
  • e.g., drop lowest two grades; complete a certain number of assessments

Try

• Considering the course context when determining where / when flexibility is appropriate
• Being transparent with your students about where / why / how you have incorporated flexibility
• Remaining mindful of impact on your workload in terms of developing and offering feedback on the assessment and how you will scaffold the assessment for students for whom this approach is new
• Identifying whether the assessment type/design will require approximately the same amount of work or considerably more work than a traditional assessment (for the instructor and the students)

Avoid

• Being too ambitious – you can start small if that is more helpful for you and your students
• Assuming that your students will understand the new/flexible approaches to assessment

Multiple Pathways

There are many ways that multiple assessment pathways can be created in a course. Choice may be offered about number of assessments, timing of assessments, modality of assessments, weighting of assessments, and so on. It is important to provide clear information about the choices available to students and, depending on the kinds of choices offered, it may be necessary to document and track student selections.

Some examples of multiple assessment pathways include:

• A choice between a short international learning opportunity and engagement in alternate local activities, each with its own associated activities and assessments.
• A choice among a range of different kinds of assessments (presentations, quizzes, podcasts, written reflections, or other formats), each with an associated points value, where students choose their preferred combination that adds up to a required number of points.
• A choice of three from among five possible short writing assignments, allowing students to select the timing and topics that work best for them.
• A choice among tests which together will amount to a set percentage of the course grade, where students can write more tests at a lower weight or fewer at a higher weight -- for instance, two midterm tests at 15% each or just one of the two at 30% -- along with a required cumulative final exam worth 45%.

In her blog post on Choose your own adventure learning, Bonnie Stachowiak provides examples of the kinds of choices she provided in an undergraduate Business course and the “contract” she used to record student selections. In a follow-up post, she adds reflections on what she would change as she further develops this approach.

Try

• Providing clear information on the elements that are subject to student choice
• Ensuring there is a way to document student choices for their own record and the instructor’s tracking
• Encouraging students to do some assessments early in the semester so that work does not pile up
• Being aware that if students are completing different combinations of assessments, possibly at different weights, this may be a challenge for the gradebook features of the Learning Management System

Avoid

• Proliferating so many choices that they become unmanageable for the instructor and overwhelming for the student

Resources

Centre for Teaching and Learning, Flexible Approaches for Setting Deadlines. University of Alberta. 

Centre for Teaching and Learning. Academic Consideration Policy. Western University. 

CIEL Blog. Flexible Assessment. Vancouver Island University. 

Hills, M., & Peacock, K. (2022). Replacing power with flexible structure: Implementing flexible deadlines to improve student learning experiences. Teaching and Learning Inquiry, 10. 

Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE). (2022). Use Flexible Assessment to Engage and Motivate Learners. 

Stachowiak, B. (2015). Choose your own adventure learning. Teaching in Higher Education. 

---. (2015). Choose your own adventure learning (part 2). Teaching in Higher Education.