Assessment of Student Learning - Minnesota State University Moorhead

Embedded Assessments

Embedded assessments are assignments, activities, or exercises that are done as part of a class, but that are used to provide assessment data about a particular learning outcome. The course instructor and/or other evaluators can evaluate the student work, often using a rubric.

Consider this class:

Assignment	Student 1	Student 2	Student 3	Student 4
Midterm exam	A	C	B	B
Research Paper	C	C	C	C
Final Exam	A	A	A	B
Final Grade	A	B	B	B

The final grades in the course show how well the individual students mastered the course material, but they don’t suggest how well the class—as a whole—did on any particular aspect of the course material.

Imagine that the department has a learning outcome that student conduct original research and write a paper discussing their results. By using the second assignment in this class, the department can compile the grades of students completing the assignments and gain data to assess this learning outcome. From the class example listed above, it would be clear that the writing a research paper is a weakness of this group of students. The research paper, then, is an embedded assessment that is done as part of the course, but the results of which are pulled from the course and applied to the learning outcomes.

Embedded assessments, because of their specific and aggregated nature, can be useful assessment measures.