The Impact of Distance Assessment on Students’ Academic Results and Perseverance in Higher Education

In Canada, the Covid-19 pandemic has led to a rethinking of the way students' learning is assessed. This raised a host of questions for their teachers, who had to turn to distance assessment: what assessment activity should students carry out? What format should be used to present instructions? What support should be provided during the assessment activity? What feedback should be given to students at the end? To inspire teachers in the implementation of distance assessment, our team categorized assessment activities at TELUQ University, a leading institution in distance teaching in Canada. To this end, more than 1,600 assessment activities were analyzed using an analysis tool developed by Gérin-Lajoie, Beaupré, Contamines, Hébert, and Paquette-Côté (2020) which provides a detailed characterization of 20 components of assessment activities. Among these assessment activities, we know among other things that: the case studies and exams are the most frequent types of assessment activities, the assessment activities include mostly instructions in text format on the course website, the teachers offer mostly on-demand support to their students, the feedback is mostly given to students in text format. Nevertheless, two important questions remain, and will be the focus of this presentation. Do certain assessment activities lead students to better academic results? Are there assessment activities that lead students to persevere more in their studies? These are the questions we will be answering in this presentation to inspire participants in setting up their own assessment activities.