Note: This content is produced from sessions presented in Anthology’s Winter 2022 Digital Teaching Symposium.

Designing and administering a variety of effective assessments is an essential component of classroom work. Accurately measuring each student’s learning, growth, and progress toward achieving standards and/or course objectives can have a profoundly positive effect on students’ achievement and the academic settings in which they reside.

An assessment blueprint (or table of specifications) is an important tool that educators can use to ensure accurate measurement of student learning outcomes, including those outcomes that require students to demonstrate cognitive complexity. An assessment blueprint or table of specifications is simply a tool that helps educators be intentional and reflective when creating exams and other forms of student evaluation. Blueprints identify the objectives and skills which are to be measured and the relative weight given to each.

There are uses for blueprints other than assessment planning. In fact, blueprints are powerful teaching tools. When blueprints are created before the topic or unit is taught, the educator goes into instruction with a highly refined vision of what students will be expected to accomplish. Students are more likely to achieve learning goals that are clearly specified and communicated. When educators start with a clear vision of what they want students to know and be able to do, they set students up to succeed. Copies of assessment blueprints can be given to students before instruction ever begins, making them aware of what they need to learn. As an example, if a test blueprint is complete before instruction unfolds in the classroom, assessments can be planned day by day. One or two test questions can be written each day so that these are closely related to the instruction that has taken place.

Accurate measurement of intended learning outcomes includes content weighting to reflect the importance of the topic and/or the amount of time spent on the topic. Asking students to demonstrate deep levels of understanding and advanced skills development are also considerations in assessment design. Most standards (including K-12 standards and professional standards) require students to demonstrate complex reasoning processes and higher-level skills development. To accurately measure mastery of complex standards, assessments must take into consideration the types of reasoning, problem solving, and skills development required by the standards. Bloom’s Taxonomy classifies learning outcomes into levels of complexity: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. These levels of understanding can assist in the design of assessments that require students to demonstrate cognitive complexity. However, research has shown that educators tend to construct assessments and test questions in the knowledge category 80% to 90% of the time, rather than focusing on measuring higher order thinking skills. Assessment blueprints help ensure that consideration is given to assessing the higher-level reasoning skills required by most standards.

A simple blueprint for a high school physics exam is provided below as an example. Each learning objective to be assessed is listed. The instructor notes the number of questions that reflect those objectives and categorizes the type of cognitive process students need to use in order to demonstrate their knowledge and understanding. The total number of test questions reflects the time available for this assessment.

Below is a second example of an assessment blueprint for a Mathematics test focused on Grade 8 standards for Understanding Geometric Transformations. This assessment uses a combination of multiple-choice and essay questions. The total number of questions reflects the time available for the assessment. The goal is to ensure that most students can complete the assessment within the time available.

Objectives to be assessed: Students will be able to:

• Demonstrate that a two-dimensional figure is congruent to another if the second can be obtained from the first by a sequence of rotations, reflections, and translations.
• Describe the effect of dilations, translations, rotations, and reflections on two-dimensional figures using coordinates.
• Demonstrate that a two-dimensional figure is similar to another if the second can be obtained from the first by a sequence of rotations, reflections, and translations.

Test Blueprint

There are a number of questions that should be addressed as part of the design of an assessment blueprint.

• Who are the students you are designing the test or assessment for?
• What are the big ideas, important concepts, and principles that students need to understand to meet course objectives?
• What knowledge do students need to have to meet these objectives? What do they need to know and remember?
• What reasoning and problem-solving skills do students need to use in order to demonstrate that they have met course objectives?
• Are there any performance skills students will need to demonstrate? What skills will students need to USE as part of the assessment?
• Are there any products that students must be able to create in order to demonstrate mastery of the objectives?

When each of these questions is answered through the design of an assessment blueprint, the resulting student evaluations will accurately assess the standards or objectives that are the focus of the course as well as the content taught during instruction.

Using an assessment blueprint allows the educator to plan content weighting. Educators demonstrate to students the topics they value by focusing more assessment time and/or more assessment questions on those topics considered important. Considerations such as those below help educators to weight topics within an assessment:

• How much class time was spent exploring the topic through videos, demonstrations, or other forms of exploration?
• How much lecture time was spent teaching the topic?
• How much time were students expected to spend studying the topic independently?

Another form of blueprint (often called an assessment outline) can be used in the design of assessments other than tests. The blueprint outline below specifies the kinds of assessments to be used for complex standards in American Government.

Assessment blueprints are appropriate for use at all academic levels. They are simple tools that provide a framework for building purpose-driven assessments and tests. They can facilitate student learning by providing a framework or mental schema for understanding course content.