This is so important and I wish there were more levers to get there. We've done assessment of online medialit (as has Sam) and I've learned more from three sentence answers than most people learn from full essays and certainly more than from MC tests. https://twitter.com/samwineburg/status/1330362992437956610

I try to teach this sort of assessment to faculty, and a lot of them get it, but some really do struggle.

The key here is to keep in mind that you are -- for most students in most courses -- not testing their ability to write papers. You are testing whether the education they are receiving is causing them to approach problems in a more informed way.

In math, that can (depending on the level and course) be pretty direct. How would a mathematician solve this problem?

In statistical literacy, which I taught for a while, the big questions were often "Given this data what would a statistician want to know? What mathematical operations might help with that?"

This isn't a precise example, but my college age daughter has an excellent sociology teacher for her sociology of class course, and one assignment was to "Watch the film Office Space and tell me what would Marx and Weber say about this firm and the worker's actions"

Here's the thing -- my daughter got me to watch it with her, and I had watched Office Space when it came out and I thought it was good. I didn't know Marx and Weber back then. I do now.

And if you know Marx and Weber and watch Office Space with that in mind, with a sociological lens? Holy shit. It's an entirely different film. And it's not going to take more than a couple sentences to see if students are watching it as a sociologist, the difference is huge.

Question you want to ask yourself with a class is always this: two people encounter the real world situation of your choice. Whatever you want to dream up. One student has taken your class, one hasn't. How would you know which one has taken your class by what they do, say, think?

If you can get down to that (and a lot of teachers do) you can get a better assessment out of a five minute exercise than an hour-long task.