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What is Assessment Blueprinting?

Assessment blueprinting is the creation of a plan of action for individual evaluation tools in your course. It should be done after you make your Course Assessment Plan and before you actually create the outlines for any assignments or set any tests. All of this should be done before you plan any course content or learning activities about the outcomes you want to assess.

At its simplest, blueprinting is the creation of a document that explains how many of each type of question or assignment will be used to evaluate each learning outcome.

Why Should I Make Assessment Blueprints?

A lot of the same advantages to making Course Assessment Plans also apply to making assessment blueprints. Note that:

• While CAPs help you ensure a variety of types of assessment in your course, blueprints ensure a variety of types of questions / activities within individual assessments.
• While CAPs help you to manage the scope of your work and that of your students over the course, blueprints help you to ensure that individual assessments are doing their jobs, and nothing more.
• Blueprints help you to gauge the difficulty of individual assignments
• Blueprints help you to make sure that you have “covered” everything by the end of the course.

You may have heard the expression “design down,” meaning, start by creating the assignments that you want students to be successful in before you create any course material. A big advantage of blueprinting is that you can still have that up-front plan, but hold off a bit on determining the exact nature of your assignments until quite a bit later.

How to Make an Assessment Blueprint

1. 1. Review the weighting assigned to each learning outcome in the CAP.
   2. Review assessments and label each assessment item as follows:
      1. Question 1: LO__ LS __ Taxonomy level (e.g. Question 1: LO 1, LS 3, – Bloom’s Taxonomy domain and level: cognitive/application (C App).
         1. Some assessments may map to several learning outcomes and learning steps.
      2. Use symbols and write on the assessment or create a spreadsheet (e.g. LO1, LS3, CA).
      3. Note: Learning outcomes must be assessed either individually or as a group, but learning steps do not have to be assessed.
      4. Note: Make note of items that assess lower levels of Bloom’s. If these are to numerous or are weighted too heavily, marks for your course may be inadvertently inflated.
   3. Transfer your assessment analysis to the Assessment Plan template.
      1. Note: You will need your assessment analysis to complete the template.

1. 1. Calculate the current weighting for each learning outcome based on the assessment tool analysis.
      1. You will need the number of the marks for each learning outcome and the weighting attributed to each assessment.
      2. For example: Question 1 (LO1, LS3, Cognitive Domain Analysis level) may be worth 10 marks, and that assessment tool may contribute 40% of the student’s final grade; so question 1 is worth 4 marks out of a possible 100, or 4% to the final grade.
      3. Subsequent questions:
         1. Is learning outcome assessed elsewhere?
         2. What is the contribution to the final grade from other sources of assessment?
         3. Does the actual weighting match the course plan?
         4. What adjustments should you make?

1. The assessment analysis may reveal discrepancies between the goals of the assessment tools, the learning outcomes, and their weightings.
   1. Review the learning outcomes with members of the blueprinting team and supervisor.
2. Identify any questions that are redundant, confusing, or irrelevant to the assessment of the learning outcome.
   1. Rewrite or delete these assessment items.
   2. Prepare new assessment items that match the assessment plan.

Last modified 15-June-2017.