In a world where artificial intelligence can easily handle routine and increasingly complex tasks, higher education institutions are taking steps to ensure that students are putting genuine effort into their assignments. This does not mean AI should not be used for brainstorming or research; in fact, it can be a valuable resource for students. However, AI's outputs should not be the final product, nor should AI replace the learning that comes from authentic effort.
As higher education institutions struggle to verify that learners' work reflects their own thinking and effort, one effective method they should be exploring is roleplay assessments. Think of an immersive assessment that places learners in real-world situations, where they take a role in the scenario and interact with colleagues to handle workplace tasks or situations. These assessments help learners think critically and apply their problem-solving skills through experiential learning and immediate feedback.
In this blog, we're going to break down 8 essential design techniques for building roleplay assessments that are AI-resilient and foster authentic, experiential learning.
Branching scenarios make learner decisions shape the next prompt, stakeholder reaction, or challenge. That makes the assessment more challenging to solve with an AI-generated answer because the learner has to respond to the consequences of their own choices.
For Author users: Build your own branching pathways in the 'Workspace' tab, and use the Production Assistant to generate the content for your branches from your course materials.
Place the learner in a specific role and have them interact with different characters who have competing priorities, goals, or concerns. For example, one character may value speed, another may care about ethics, and another may focus on cost.
For Author users: The Generate Playbook features a step where the Production Assistant can create your own dynamic characters and a specific role for the learner to take on. You can easily customize separate pathways for learners to interact with each character in the assessment.
Instead of saving all evaluations for the end, place short open-response questions throughout the roleplay. Ask learners to justify a decision, explain why they chose a path, or predict what might happen next. This captures thinking during the process, as it is more difficult to use AI when the learner must explain their decision-making throughout the assessment.
For Author users: There's a step in the Generate Playbook that seamlessly generates questions from your course materials, including both multiple-choice and open-response. Use this step to generate your own open-response checkpoints after any question you'd like learners to reflect on.
Create complex scenarios where important information appears gradually and must be remembered and applied later. Therefore, learners may need to recall important plot themes and points. Not only does this reward close attention and active participation, but it also makes it difficult for AI to give the correct answer.
For Author users: Use the Generate Playbook steps that prompt the Production Assistant to generate a scenario and story arc. Prompt the Production Assistant to design a scenario where earlier context is required to answer questions or problems in the assessment.
Add durable skills as learning objectives in your assessment. Build scoring around priorities such as empathy, professionalism, evidence use, or reasoning. Scoring for decision quality helps identify how learners use durable skills to get the correct answer through decision-making. It also helps them understand how durable skills are applied in the context of the scenario and course area.
For Author users: The Generate Playbook makes it easy to create learning objectives based on your Activity Purpose statement and uploaded course materials. Simply ask the production Assistant to create learning objectives that score learners' decision-making quality through reasoning and other durable skills required in the assessment.
Introduce new information mid-scenario, such as a policy change, an upset stakeholder, missing information, or a shift in priorities. Then require the learner to adapt their response. This makes the assessment more resilient to AI when learners are required to adapt their strategies to reflect changes made in the scenario.
For Author users: Use the Generate Playbook and Production Assistant to introduce new information at any point in the scenario through character dialogue or by providing updated versions of material resources to learners.
Create assessments with scenarios that mirror real-world situations, such as handling workplace conflict, advising a client, or responding to patients. Build tasks that reflect how people actually use knowledge in practice. These scenarios depend on authentic judgment, situational awareness of the context, and proper communication choices.
For Author users: Using the Generate Playbook and Production Assistant, you can customize a scenario that reflects the real-world environment of your subject area, inviting learners to take on a role and engage in tasks they would be expected to perform in that environment.
Educators should leverage learners' performance data to evaluate patterns of choices across the entire simulation. This makes it possible to assess consistency, growth, and decision-making over time.
For Author users: Authors have access to rich assessment analytics that provide a full picture of which questions and learning objectives students are succeeding at or need more improvement with. Educators can also map out decision-making journeys for each learner and understand the consistency of their choices and open-response answers.
An impactful roleplay assessment should be dynamic. In other words, it should immerse learners in a real-world environment and encourage them to put forth their best effort for authentic learning and skill application. It should ask learners to interpret context, make decisions, adapt to changing situations, and explain their thinking.
This is where Author is especially effective. It supports roleplay-based assessments that are interactive and contextual, while providing meaningful feedback that helps learners stay focused on developing the knowledge and skills needed to succeed through experiential learning.
Want to start building high-quality assessments that foster authentic learning? Schedule a 30-minute demo with us, and we'll walk you through creating a roleplay assessment tailored to your use case.