LAE Assessment My Course Was Selected For LAE Assessment Reporting. What Do I Do Now???

LAE Assessment in a Nutshell Each Course in the LAE has an LAE Assessment Plan. The Plan describes how that course supports the “Goals for Student Learning in the LAE”. The Plan also describes how to verify that the students are learning what they are supposed to (related to the LAE) in the course. Your job will be to follow the “Plan” and then put the results into an “Assessment Report”. This presentation was designed to help you do just that!

Stick to the Plan! The Plan for your course was developed by your department, and is available on a link from the Registrar’s Web-Page: http://www.muskingum.edu/home/registrar/LAEAssessment.html The Plan was developed by your department and approved by the Assessment Committee. YOU MUST FOLLOW THE PLAN! When you read through the Plan, the assessment process will be spelled out in great detail.

What is a “Stream of Evidence” As you read through the plan, you’ll notice that each Plan has at least two “Streams of Evidence”. A “Stream of Evidence” is how you measure whether students are meeting the Goals for the Course. A Stream might be how well students answered a particular test question, how well they performed a certain task or assignment, or how well they self- reported their understanding of a specific goal(s). Streams of Evidence are not the same as grades. A student could fail the course but still successfully meet the LAE Goals for the course, or vice versa. The Results from these “Streams of Evidence” make up a large portion of the LAE Assessment Report!

Plan Vs. Report, What’s the Difference? The Plan explains to YOU how to assess the course. The Report explains to EVERYONE ELSE how well the students met the course’s LAE Goals, as well has how the course and/or assessment process could be improved the next time around. At the end of the term, you need to complete and submit the LAE Assessment Report to the Assessment Committee. Much of the LAE Assessment Report is simply copied from the LAE Assessment Plan. The next few slides will explain the Report Creation process in detail.

Assessment Report Header In the LAE Assessment Report, the following items are copied directly from the LAE Assessment Plan for your Course: Term: (Enter the term in which the assessment took place) Course: (Enter the course, and section number) Writing Unit: (Yes or No) Instructor: (That would be YOU!) Methods: (Copy this from your course’s LAE Assessment Plan) LAE Category: (Another easy one!) Goal: (Copy this from your course’s LAE Assessment Plan) Learning Objective: (Copy this from your course’s LAE Assessment Plan) Departmental Perspective (if applicable): (Copy this from your course’s LAE Assessment Plan)

Assessment Report “Results” (Section A.) This is the first section requiring real thought! For each “Stream of Evidence” you need to break it down to how many students “Exceeded”, “Met”, or “Failed to Meet” expectations. The definition of Exceeded, Met, and Failed to Meet, should be listed in the Plan. If it is not, then you may need to break it down yourself in some meaningful way. If your plan has a rubric with 4 or 5 levels (Ex: Superior, Excellent, Good, Acceptable, and Poor) you will need to group some of the levels together so you can report numbers based on the three categories of “Exceeded”, “Met”, and “Failed to Meet”. If you do need to make such adjustments, please explain your criteria in the report so that the logic behind the numbers is clear.

Assessment Report “Results” (cont.) You need to report the number of students in the three categories for each “Stream of Evidence”. For many of the plans, a “Student Self-Assessment” (something like a Course Evaluation) will be distributed the last day of class for students to fill out. If your plan uses the “Student Self-Assessment”, you will receive the results for that stream from CNS a few weeks after the term ends. Simply plug in the three numbers from the questionnaire as your second stream!

Assessment Report “Results” (cont.) After entering your “results” the box should look like this: In this example there were 9 students in the class. For Stream 1 (defined in the Course’s Plan) 5 exceeded, 3 met, 1 failed to meet. For Stream 2 (also defined in the Course’s Plan), 7 exceeded, 2 met, 0 failed to meet. Learning Objective or Departmental Perspective (enter the one from your plan here) Number and percentage of students exceeding expectations Number and percentage of students meeting expectations Number and percentage of students failing to meet expectations 1st Stream of Evidence 5 / 55% 3 / 33% 1 / 11% 2nd Stream of Evidence 7 / 77% 2 / 22% 0 / 0%

Assessment Report Sections B and C Now for two more easy parts. Sections B and C are simply copied from the relevant portions of you course’s LAE Assessment Plan. B. Student work examined: (Copy this from your course’s LAE Assessment Plan) C. Scoring Criteria: (Copy this from your course’s LAE Assessment Plan)

Put on your Thinking Caps! Sections D, E, and F are possibly the most important parts of the report. D. (Reflections on the course outcomes) is the place for your thoughts about how students did in meeting the goals. If there were factors that may have skewed the results, or affected student performance, those also go here. E. (Reflections on the assessment) is for you to reflect on the assessment process, assessment tool, or to place your ideas for how this process might be improved. F. (Plan of action). What did you learn from D and E, and how will you apply it the next time around. This is where “Continuous Improvement” happens!!!

Submit Your Report! Submit your report to Emily Smith in the VPAA’s Office (ejsmith@muskingum.edu) If something is missing or incorrect, the Assessment Committee may return the report to you for revision. Don’t forget to follow up on the items you specified in the “Plan of Action”. Thank you for your participation in this continuous improvement process!