Assessments

Introduction

Current Assessment Instructions

Assessment is something we do all the time on our classes, whether in the form of quizzes, tests, lab exercises, student response systems, or in some other manner. Much of this is “formative assessment”, in which the purpose of the evaluation is to identify what students understand and to assist in the learning process. Some it is “summative assessment”, in which the goal is simply to determine students’ achievement of the course material and objectives. Very often, formative and summative assessment are combined into a single assessment instrument, such as a test.

Although such assessments have been a part of academia since the days of yore, there have been efforts afoot in recent years to make reporting of assessment results a mandatory government requirement. Many of these efforts are well-intentioned (and, admittedly, some are not), but they have created an onus on educational institutions of all levels to document that students are learning important concepts. Again, it is worth noting that such an evaluation, in and of itself, can provide valuable information about what teaching methods work best or what parts of a course’s curriculum may need additional tweaking.

Fortunately, while ACC is required to document student learning, the guidelines are quite broad and there is no government requirement about the specifics of how this should be done. We are thus free to develop assessment measures that are meaningful and useful, and our only additional obligation is to document this information in a way that is easy for the state and our accrediting body to review, and that we are able to demonstrate that the information gathered is used to improve student learning. For ACC, this means that each department needs to provide information to the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) and to the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB). The history and guidelines are detailed below.

SACS and General Education Requirements

SACS “Principles of Accreditation” requires that all degree plans, both workforce and academic, have 15 credit hours in General Education courses. These must include at least one 3-hour course from:

Students must include at least one course in each area from the General Education list in their ACC coursework in order to earn a degree. Since academic degrees usually have about 66 credit hours, the General Education requirements, while they apply to all degree plans, are most relevant with regard to workforce degrees.

To satisfy SACS requirements with regard to General Education courses, they must “ensure breadth of knowledge, and...[be] based on a coherent rationale” (SACS Principles of Accreditation, 2.7.3). At ACC, these have been interpreted to mean we must demonstrate that our students, upon completing their minimum of 15 hours of General Education coursework for their associate’s degree, have mastered broad-based skills such as:

THECB and the Core Curriculum

In 1997, the Texas Legislature established the “Core Curriculum”, a set of “intellectual competencies”, i.e., skills such as critical thinking and computer literacy, which a student at any Texas college or university must have in order to receive an undergraduate degree. By taking a block of courses that cover these intellectual competencies, students can transfer this block of courses to any other institution of higher learning.

As put into practice, a student must take 42 credit hours spread across several disciplines, including English composition, Communications, Mathematics, Natural Sciences, Humanities, Visual and Performing Arts, History, Government, and Social and Behavioral Sciences. Each of the courses in the Core Curriculum has designated intellectual competencies, which include:

That students meet these competencies is demonstrated by their achievement of specified “Exemplary Educational Objectives” (or EEO’s). These EEO’s are defined for each division of the Core Curriculum (e.g., Humanities or Mathematics). Each course listed in the Core Curriculum has to document to the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board that students effectively meet these objectives. With the exception of the workforce courses in environmental technology, and the engineering courses, every course in the Physics, Astronomy, and Engineering; and in Earth and Environmental Sciences is in the Core Curriculum. So almost every faculty member in our departments is involved in this process.

Some manner of program assessment was already in place in many departments, and most implemented some sort of assessment strategy, documenting the results through a ULEAD database that was established. The college submitted a report to the Coordinating Board in September, 2004, documenting its compliance with the Core Curriculum requirements. The response (which was only received in Fall, 2007), concluded that the “well-written and well-documented report...clearly shows the alignment of the core curriculum with the THECB’s exemplary educational objectives using multiple methods to demonstrate the alignment”. So far, so good.

Reporting on the General Education/Core Curriculum Requirements

Because of the great correspondence between the General Education and Core Curriculum reporting and assessment requirements, courses in the Core Curriculum are also those that are used to satisfy General Education requirements. Vice-President Goodall in Fall, 2006, restructured the pre-existing Core Curriculum Task Force into the new General Education/Core Curriculum Committee, and charged it with better aligning the two sets of instructional and reporting requirements. The committee has broad representation from across both academic/transfer and workforce areas.

The Coordinating Board has recently brought their report schedule into alignment with the SACS reporting schedule. The next reports to The Coordinating Board and SACS will have to include:

Every course in the Core Curriculum will thus need to have some sort of assessment to determine if students in the course are learning the relevant exemplary educational objectives and intellectual competencies. This report will necessitate substantial participation and input from faculty across the college. Every department is free to develop whatever means of assessment it feels is most appropriate for each of its General Education/Core Curriculum courses, but it must implement them. In many cases, effective assessment strategies are already in place and what is needed is simply to compile the data from different sections of a given course.

For this process to work, the assessment strategies employed must be measurable, they must be practical, and they must not be tied to individual instructors or used in any punitive fashion. It is also unrealistic to expect that any assessment strategy that significantly adds to the professor’s workload or eliminates time for instruction will be (or, indeed, should be) implemented by faculty. For that reason, the focus has been on reviewing strategies that involve embedded assessment (done in the course of instruction) or testing outside of class.

Examples of external assessment strategies (or at least those outside of our departmental courses) would include a computer literacy assessment conducted when a student enrolls, an information literacy exercise incorporated into the curriculum of ENGL 1301, or even a standardized test such as the MAPP test (Measure of Academic Proficiency and Progress).

Embedded assessments, which are what our departments use, are intended to minimize the workload of instructors while still gathering valuable data. These may include:

Student response systems in particular are an approach that holds much potential. These systems allow students to respond anonymously to questions posed by the instructor, allowing the faculty member to find areas where students have questions, and, in the process, automatically recording student understanding of key concepts. The iClicker system, in particular, is both easy to use and relatively inexpensive. Common test or lab exercise questions (such as that on the scientific method) are another technique that provides both useful assessment data and meaningful instruction.

How a course is evaluated is up to the individual department. That bears repeating. No one is going to tell any program how they are going to assess their students’ learning. This is a vital pillar of academic freedom, and no one at this institution wants to impose a rigid, standardized format on the diversity and variety of instructional programs we offer. The assessment instrument chosen will, however, have to be explicitly tied to “exemplary educational objectives” (EEO’s) as defined by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. These, in turn, are linked to fundamental “intellectual competencies” such as reading, writing, computer literacy, etc.

Once the department decides how to do its assessment for each Core Curriculum/General Education course, the department chair or his minion enters this information into the Assessment Database (also known as ULEAD), which is maintained by the Office of Institutional Effectiveness and Assessment. Any and all instructors involved in the given course assessment report their results to the department chair. The department faculty should then review these results and decide upon a course of action to improve student learning. What course of is decided upon should also be entered into the database, and the (ideally improved) results followed up on in the ensuing semesters.

With regards to evaluating the EEO’s and intellectual competencies of the General Education/Core Curriculum courses, the magnitude of this task is such that most departments are attempting to evaluate either a few courses at a time or only one EEO across all their courses. Ours is a diverse department, whose disciplines literally cover everything in the universe, so developing consistent assessment instruments that can be used across different courses is challenging, to say the least. But it can be done, and it can be done well.