Directing assessment at supporting learning

This paper describes an attempt to use assessment activities in a course to support student learning and improve the quality of the students' learning experience. It aims to show that assessment activities can be more than devices for merely measuring the achievement of learning outcomes. Innovative use of assessment tasks can serve to scaffold learning and indeed enrich the quality of the student learning experience. Assessment activities that are able to lead to such outcomes mirror the sorts of activities that students are likely to be doing while in professional practice. As such, they provide students with training that they will need for professional practice. This paper seeks to illustrate how some of these types of goals are being pursued in a graduate level course that is offered exclusively in an online distance education format.