1. Broadening Participation in the Assessment of Student Communication Skills Joan Hawthorne University of North Dakota

2. Today’s Agenda Introduction and overview Assessment purposes and participation Break Sharing ownership ◦ Engaging faculty ◦ Building partnerships ◦ Student contributions Conclusions and evaluations

3. Questions to consider What do we mean by assessment? What are we trying to accomplish when we do assessment? Who are we doing assessment for?

4. Assessment at NIU: A method for analyzing and describing student learning outcomes or program achievement of objectives.

5. Assessment and the HLC: Organizations assess student learning in meaningful, useful, and workable ways to evaluate how they are achieving their commitments and to act on the results in ways that advance student learning and improve educational quality.

6. My own definition: Assessment usually means the systematic collection of information about achievement of desired student learning outcomes across a group of students.

7. Where are the tensions at NIU? Assessment vs. program evaluation? Assessment vs. grading? Other?

8. TO CONSIDER: What do you want to get out of the work you put into assessment? What is motivating your current assessment work? Who’s using the findings? What would you like to motivate any new assessment efforts?

9. Possible purposes? Improvement Student-centeredness Decrease insularity, inertia Accountability Because we want “students to get the best possible education” (Suskie) Other?

10. So, focusing on written communication… 1. What do you mean? 2. What will you accomplish? 3. Who wants this information? THUS: What kinds of processes should be used? And who helps?

11. How can this assessment be conducted so that it does NOT fulfill the negative stereotypes about assessment?

12. What do faculty want? Good assessments will “…reveal common values, provide opportunities for inquiry and debate about unsettled issues….” CCCC Statement

13. “Who helps?” with assessment is an ownership question. Who will own this process? Who will own the findings?

14. What is the across-the- institution ROLE and RESPONSIBILITY of faculty?

15. Who could be involved? Faculty Students Administrators Professional staff Stakeholders from “outside” Other?

16. TO DISCUSS: What are the intrinsic motivations for involvement in assessment of writing upon which you could build? What roles might participants take? * consider for faculty * consider for students * consider for others

17. Faculty As contributors of student work As participants in planning As participants in scoring As participants in analysis As participants in loop-closing To answer questions Because they’ve contributed student work Because they value the learning Because they own the program Because they’ll learn things about teaching

18. Students As learners As contributors As criteria- generators As scorers As participants in analysis As participants in loop-closing To accrue a portfolio To get feedback To learn “perspective” To take learning seriously To help with accountability To get a great education

19. “Bringing students more actively into the processes of assessment may well be the most powerful route to greater faculty engagement.” Pat Hutchings

20. What tools or strategies would motivate your faculty to be involved? What tools or strategies would motivate your students to be involved? What about other participants?

21. As Lee Shulman, educator and author, wrote, “We are limited in our recounting by the instruments we use to count.” He’s right. And assessment which doesn’t provide useful answers to real questions about teaching and learning is assessment that wastes our time.

22. Who owns writing at NIU? Partnerships require sharing ownership.

23. “OK, I admit it: I like assessment. I like it because it encourages faculty members to think more carefully about what they do, how they do it, and why they do it that way. I like it because it helps raise questions about how our teaching strategies affect learning outcomes. And I like it because in the process we discover more about how our teaching fits with programs and curricula beyond our own courses.” Theodore Wagenaar