Welcome. My name is Dr. Shari Barrett. I'm the Director of the Office of Outcomes Assessment at Johnson County Community College.
We're here today to talk about assessment, and specifically, we're here today to talk about a framework for conducting assessment.
This framework is independent of anything related to your discipline, the college that you serve at, or any of those kinds of parameters.
But rather, it is a conceptual framework, upon which you can build your assessment strategy.
Sitting here besides me, you may have noticed a poster.
We call this "The Cycle of Assessment", and it is very similar to Action Research.
So, if you have colleagues in K-12, this is something they've heard of, before.
It starts with a question, moves to a plan, goes to collection and scoring, "analyze and discuss", and "report and act".
Well, let's start with a question.
Very often, when we talk about assessment, this is an area where faculty will jump in, feet-first, and begin "assessing".
However, they haven't really given much thought to what they want to know about their students. That's where the question comes in.
What are those areas within your discipline, within your classes or programs,
that you instinctually know that students are not quite "getting it"? They're not achieving the level of outcomes that you want.
Let's start by writing a question that asks that, and make sure it's very narrow.
Don't ask a broad question about their attitudes, or those kinds of things, but make it very narrow.
Make it on a fundamental issue within your discipline.
Once you've defined what the question is, you can move on to planning for it.
Look at your curriculum, over the course of an entire academic year,
Where in the academic year do you teach those concepts,
whether it's at a beginning phase, where they're doing formative learning, or if it's at a later stage, where they're doing summative learning?
Where do you want to insert that assessment?
And then, the question is, what are you going to use to assess?
It could be a pre-post test. It could be embedded test questons in the midterm or final exam.
It could be a homework assignment, given over multiple weeks.
It could be a speech, or a paper, that you evaluate on a rubric. A lot will depend on what that initial question is.
My one rule of thumb in dividing a plan for this is to make sure you do it after midterm.
If you assess students prior to that, you are really assessing what they knew, when they came in the door.
What you want to know is what did they learn, when they were in your class.
Next, we're going to collect and score. It's important to think about some of the different options for this, whether it's dichotomous,
kind of "yes, they got it 100% right", or maybe it's along a scale, they got it partially right.
I always recommend that you start with a pilot of your assessment instrument,
so you have time to tweak it, before you roll it out to a broader set of faculty, or programs.
Then, next comes the "analyze and discuss" stage. This can be kind of scary, how are you going to analyze your data?
Before you start that process, and before you know what your data tells you, go ahead and set a benchmark.
Decide what it is you want to know about your students, and at what level you expect them to have completed the assignment,
whether you want 70% of your students to whatever that framework is, that benchmark that you have.
Otherwise, when you start analyzing the data, your expectations will sink to the level of student performance.
Start with basics. Go ahead, and find out what the averages are for your student performance of the questions, or on the papers.
Go ahead, and look at frequencies. How often do they score right or score wrong,
and what answers would they be more likely to choose, when they're wrong?
That will tell you if it's the assessment instrument, or the students that didn't learn properly.
Next, you're going to Report and Act. It's really important when you're thinking about assessment
to think about "How am I going to act on what I learn?"
This is supposed to inform your curriculum, to improve student learning,
That's the true focus of assessment: improving student learning.
The reporting part really speaks to people in my position.
We wanna be able to field questions from the Higher Learning Commission, our regional accrediting body, or maybe from a state agency,
that has questions about student learning.
We don't want faculty to worry about that. But, unless you report your data out to us, we don't know the answers to give.
So, taken all together, this is the Cycle of Assessment,
and it is a really helpful, useful way to think about assessment within your discipline, within your program, or within your school.