Understanding Assessment: The Student Experience of Criterion-Referenced Assessment in a Public Relations Course

Criterion-referenced assessment (CRA) involves designing assessment tasks in line with subject goals, identifying skills to be demonstrated within an assessment task, assigning relative weights to, and describing each relative skill/criterion (Carlson, MacDonald, Gorely, Hanrahan, & Burgess-Limerick, 2000). In order to increase transparency and encourage assessment for learning, CRA was embedded within an undergraduate introductory public relations unit in 2004. In 2005, research was undertaken to explore the ongoing effectiveness of this assessment paradigm and to identify how more than 150 students used the CRA approach to enhance their learning. The findings of this study show continued strong use of and support for CRA, which has encouraged implementation of CRA across the public relations sequence.