Building Your Assessment Plan Esther Isabelle Wilder Lehman College

The assessment of student learning is the process of...  “Establishing clear, measurable expected outcomes of student learning  Ensuring that students have sufficient opportunities to achieve those objectives  Systematically gathering, analyzing, and interpreting evidence to determine how well student learning matches our expectations  Using the resulting information to understanding and improve student learning” Source: Suskie, Linda Assessing Student Learning: A Common Sense Guide. San Francisco, CA: Anker Publishing Company, Inc. Pg. 3.

Assessment as a Four-Step Continuous Cycle Source: Suskie, Linda. Pg. 4.

Good Learning Assessment Practices  Give useful information that is accurate to the extent possible  Are ethically fair to students and instructors  Are practical, realistic and cost-effective  Are systematic (not one-shot deals)  Yield results that are put to good use and shared with interested parties, including students

Creating an Assessment Plan  The rationale for assessment?  How will assessment be carried out?  What support structures will be provided?  How will you monitor and evaluate assessment activities?

Developing Learning Goals  When you develop learning goals, aim for ones that are neither too broad nor too specific and use concrete action words To vague: Students will demonstrate quantitative literacy skills. Too specific: Students will be able to calculate a mean for a class grade distribution. Better: Students will be able to understand and apply measures of central tendency such as mean, median and mode.  Avoid fuzzy terms (e.g., “think critically”)  Focus on the most important goals and what skills they should have after they have completed the materials in the course Working with others to establish goals is also recommended (Suskie 2003).

Other Considerations in Developing an Assessment Strategy  Formative (taken while student learning is taking place, often to improve teaching) vs. Summative assessment (taken at the end of course/assignment).  Direct (e.g., skills tests, portfolios) vs. Indirect measures of student learning assessment (student perceptions of learning, etc.)  Objective vs. Subjective  Quantitative vs. Qualitative  Different perspectives for assessment (Suskie 2003): Standards-based: Are students meeting a minimum standard? Benchmarking: Are students improving? – difficult to do because it is hard to motivate students to do their best on pre-assessments. Best-practice perspectives: How do students compare to the best of their peers? Longitudinal: Is program improving? – compare students to peers in previous years. Capability perspective: Are students living up to their capability (difficult to measure what students’ capability should be)

Assessment Tools  Rubrics for course assignments create scoring guides for assignments, i.e., a simply list or guide that indicates the criteria used to evaluate an assignment)  Create “effective assignments” (Sukie, 2003) Include learning goals and have meaningful tasks that correspond to goals Make the assignment a worthwhile use of learning time Set realistic but challenging goals that students can achieve  Encourage student reflection Ask them to reflect on what, how and why they have learned (e.g., journals, self-ratings, etc.)  Portfolios (folders that contain samples of student work and evidence of learning)  Create objective tests or use pre-existing published tests  Surveys, focus groups and interviews

Making the Most of Assessments  Aggregate and summarize results (tables, graphs, etc.)  Evaluate the assessment Are the results representative? Did the test/rubric/etc. work as intended?  Analyze results (multivariate techniques, etc.)  Share the results  Use the findings to better promote student learning