Using Category Tagging to Educate with Intention - Guidebook An Outcomes-Centered Approach to Teaching, Learning, and Assessment
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Guidebook Using Category Tagging to Educate with Intention An Outcomes-Centered Approach to Teaching, Learning, and Assessment www.examsoft.com
Introduction Educators bring specific goals to teaching, learning, and assessment, and category tagging provides the data necessary to achieve these goals. Learn how a digital assessment solution with category-tagging capabilities can support intentionality in higher ed. This guidebook will walk you through the basics of category tagging and provide real-life examples to help you get started. 1. What Is Category Tagging? Category tagging is a digital assessment feature that allows educators to connect exam items and rubric areas to text-based categories. These categories are completely customizable to accommodate a range of academic subjects and assessment types. They are also divisible into tiers, allowing a single parent category to house multiple subcategories. In short, category tagging makes it possible to create a system of categories and subcategories that correspond to individual questions on an assessment. 2 | Guidebook
2. Why Use Category Tagging?
Category tagging supports the triangulation of teaching, learning, and assessment, giving
educators the opportunity to tie the topics they’re teaching back to their assessments and
use the results to figure out if students are achieving the necessary learning outcomes.
By connecting exam items and rubric areas to specific categories, category tagging lays the
groundwork for post-exam reporting that details performance in specific content areas.
With insights from these category-based reports, educators can make informed decisions to
support students, courses, and entire programs.
Category tagging gives educators the tools to center assessment on specific learning targets,
which promotes intentionality in the educational process.
Using Category Tagging to Educate with Intention | 3
3. What Does It Mean to Educate with Intention? In Understanding by Design (UbD), Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe introduce a concept called “backward design,” which involves identifying learning goals prior to developing content or instructional strategies. When learning goals serve as the foundation of teaching and assessment, educators can trace back every content area they teach or assess to these goals. These foundational goals represent the intention that drives a course or curriculum. Promoting intentionality in education with this outcomes-centered approach deepens student learning, both by providing cohesion and consistency across learning activities and reinforcing students’ grasp of key concepts and ideas. While learning goals vary depending on the nature of the course or program, category tagging allows educators at all levels and across academic disciplines to generate the reports they need to gauge performance within each content area, course objective, or programmatic outcome. 4 | Guidebook
4. What Specific Goals Can Category
Tagging Support?
With category tagging as a framework for every assessment, educators can collect the data they need
to support achievement at the individual student level, at the course level, and even at the program or
institutional level. Category tagging supports the following efforts:
• Fostering Student Success • Simplifying Accreditation Review
- Identify areas where students excel so they can - Tag exam items to accreditation standards
make informed career decisions. to demonstrate where they are taught and
assessed.
- Indicate content areas where students need
improvement to guide effective study habits. - Demonstrate the attainment of educational
outcomes, both in aggregate and at the individual
- Share exam performance by category, giving
student level.
students the autonomy to self-remediate.
- Provide evidence to accreditors that the program
• Providing Quality Instruction continuously evaluates and improves curriculum
- View performance trends across exam-takers to and teaching.
identify course-wide areas of improvement.
• Improving Curriculum Design
- Identify which instructional methods and
- Identify and eliminate content gaps within
teachings are working and which aren’t.
instruction and assessment.
- Understand the distribution of time needed to
- Demonstrate progress on teaching and assessing
effectively reinforce topics in class.
learning goals over the semester.
• Delivering Effective Exams - Show the correlation between assessment
- Build exam blueprints to define exam content topics and the topics covered in classes and
based on the subject areas covered in teaching. assignments.
- Use performance statistics to identify which exam
items will best accomplish learning goals.
Common Category Types
- Ensure exams are well balanced, fair, and reliable • Course Objectives • Board/Licensure Exam
by tagging exam items to difficulty levels, such as • Programmatic Outcomes • Accreditation Standards
Bloom’s Taxonomy. • Core Curricular Areas • Professional Competencies
• Bloom’s Taxonomy • Non-Cognitve Skills
Using Category Tagging to Educate with Intention | 5
5. What Reporting Is Possible with Category Tagging? Having a system for category tagging in place makes it possible to generate focused reports that reveal performance insights for each category. Data from these reports can help educators track progress on the goals or intentions they bring to teaching, learning, and assessment. Below are three examples of category-based reporting: Category Reports for Individual Students Students tend to be most familiar with quiz or exam material immediately after completing an assessment. Providing detailed performance feedback can deepen student learning and guide study efforts, especially when students receive this feedback shortly after testing. Sharing these reports with students helps to contextualize their final score with their performance in each category included on the assessment. Category-based reporting can give students meaningful feedback on their performance without revealing specific questions and answers on a quiz or exam. When students know the categories in which they excel, as well as the areas that require improvement, educators can turn every assessment into a valuable learning opportunity. 6 | Guidebook
Course-Wide Category Reports
When delivering instruction to large courses or multiple sections of a course, educators may find it
difficult to know if their teaching methods are effective across the board. While assessment is a good
way to gauge instructional effectiveness, it can be challenging to observe performance trends across
every quiz and exam delivered throughout the semester.
Category tagging can help you analyze performance data across multiple assessments in a single
course or in many courses. These course-wide reports show the areas where most students are doing
well and where they are struggling, which helps educators to identify the topics they may need to revisit
in their teaching.
Educators can also configure these reports to show category performance over a selected period and
gauge the efficacy of instructional adjustments over time. With longitudinal data to observe course
performance, each assessment represents a chance for educators to check in on students’ progress
and make instructional changes to strengthen their grasp of required outcomes and achieve key
learning targets.
Using Category Tagging to Educate with Intention | 7
Programmatic Category Performance Program administrators are responsible for ensuring that courses within the curricula are on track to achieve certain goals, such as programmatic outcomes and accreditation standards. A category tagging tool makes it easy to view content coverage across multiple courses and assessments. By implementing category tagging across courses within a program, administrators can generate reports that reveal performance trends, identify any at-risk categories, and observe any content area gaps — for single courses or multiple courses. With these insights, programs can strengthen their curricula to ensure all courses are on track with required objectives. Administrators can also customize the reports to show trends in performance over time. These longitudinal reports demonstrate compliance with accreditation standards and show accreditors that the program is engaged in the continuous improvement of teaching, learning, and assessment necessary to earn and maintain accreditation. 8 | Guidebook
6. Real Examples of How Educators Are
Using Category Tagging
Sullivan University, College of Pharmacy & Health Sciences
Goal: Reveal performance trends and content coverage at the course and program level.
Categories: Faculty Name, Bloom’s Taxonomy, Content Area, Center for the Advancement of Pharmacy Education (CAPE)
Outcome, Pharmacy Curriculum Outcomes Assessment (PCOA) Standard
Results: The Office of Academic Affairs and Assessment (OAcA) runs longitudinal performance reports to demonstrate
that the PharmD and Physician Assistant programs are meeting the required criteria.
Read the Full Case Study
University of Toledo, College of Nursing – Maternal-Child Course
Goal: Explore the effectiveness of empathy-building exercises with pre-intervention and post-intervention assessments.
Categories: Non-cognitive, interpersonal skills
Results: While this research is still in progress, these pre- and post-intervention assessments are intended to determine
if the exercises are effectively developing students’ empathy skills toward patient populations.
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William Carey University, School of Pharmacy
Goal: Generate programmatic performance reports to support the accreditation process.
Categories: Educational Outcomes and Competencies (EOCs), Ability-Based Outcomes (ABOs), Levels of Learning.
Results: These programmatic reports have provided a birds-eye view of performance to streamline accreditation visits
and illustrate improvements from curricular adjustments.
Read the Full Case Study
Using Category Tagging to Educate with Intention | 9Are You Ready to Get Started
with Category Tagging?
ExamSoft’s data-driven assessment platform gives educators the tools to create
a custom category-tagging system and access pre-built reports for individual
students, courses, and programs, all to achieve goals related to teaching, learning,
and assessment.
Contact us to learn how ExamSoft supports an outcomes-centered
approach to education.
10 | GuidebookAbout Turnitin Turnitin is a global company dedicated to ensuring the integrity of education and meaningfully improving learning outcomes. For more than 20 years, Turnitin has partnered with educational institutions to promote honesty, consistency, and fairness across all subject areas and assessment types. Our products are used by educational institutions and certification and licensing programs to uphold integrity and increase learning performance, and by students and professionals to do their best, original work. About ExamSoft ExamSoft is the digital assessment platform that helps institutions achieve higher levels of course, program, and student success. With an intuitive testing application, ExamSoft makes it simple to create, administer, and grade exams, and generate detailed performance reports from the results — all to provide educators with a complete and accurate view of student learning. www.examsoft.com © 2023 ExamSoft WorldWide. All rights reserved. ES_GL_IntentionalEducation_Ebook_US_1122
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