News Fall '25

Don’t recognize an acronym? See our acronyms glossary at the end of this newsletter.

Do you lead assessment for your program/discipline? Check out our new “Program Chairs Corner!”

Fall Outcomes Assessment: What should we even be doing right now?
Tableau Update - View Outcomes Assessment Results Over Time
General Education Outcomes Self-Assessment Results: Faculty Thoughts and Next Steps
Test Drive - Our newest column of assessments ideas faculty could take for a spin
- Not Just a Test: Assessment as a Process
- Learn Something New: CAI’s Professional Development Opportunities
PC Corner - especially for faculty leading unit outcomes assessment
- Communicating with unit faculty about assessment
- Solving Assessment Puzzles
- Coming Soon: 2026-29 Assessment Guidelines and Assessment Plan Templates
Assessment Almanac
- Getting to the Point: Using Outcomes to Help Students Make Science-Related Decisions - Jennifer Schramm, Life Science Faculty

Fall Outcomes Assessment: What should we even be doing right now?

What should faculty be doing right now with outcomes assessment? Great Fall Week 8 question, when we’re all just trying to get everything done as the holidays begin.

Lots of faculty help programs/disciplines in the fall get a bigger picture of what students are learning in the classes they offer by incorporating a unit assessment into their classes.

This means if you’re teaching a course that your program or discipline uses for unit outcomes assessment, just make sure you’ve planned how to use the assignment, quiz, or rubric that your program/discipline point person is asking you to use.

For unit leads, this means, if you haven’t yet, remember to connect with faculty you’re counting on to administer common assignments or quizzes, or to apply common rubrics to their own assignments.

Not every course has an assessment like this. But for those courses that do, having faculty make a plan to administer the assessment really helps students get the best out of their Chemeketa education in the long run. With a clearer picture of what's working well and where adjustments could help, everyone wins!

Tableau Update - View Outcomes Assessment Results Over Time

Hot off the Assessment Press: AOE’s Colton Christian and Beth Holscher have built a new view into the Tableau Outcomes Assessment Report that lets faculty see outcomes assessment results over time.

Working with faculty on program reviews and unit plans, Colton saw that this new report would be helpful, and asked if Beth could draft it up. Assessment Liaison Kim Colantino helped them refine the report to be clearer for faculty, and they have just released it.

To view a unit’s outcome assessment results that are collected in Tableau, and to see this new view of results over time, follow these steps:

Open an incognito window in Google (Ctrl + N)
Log into employee.chemeketa.edu
Click the Tableau tile to open the app
Click on this link to the Tableau Outcomes Assessment Report (NOTE: the college has a good number, but a limited number, of Tableau licenses. At this time, while part-time faculty cannot view the reports, all full-time faculty have access.)

Thank you to Andrew Scholer from Computer Science for letting us feature his unit's Canvas assessment data in this image.

General Education Outcomes Self-Assessment Results: Faculty Thoughts and Next Steps

What do our graduates say about how Chemeketa helped them grow? English Faculty and Assessment Liaison Kim Colantino led a conversation about this topic at this year’s faculty retreat, presenting the initial results of Chemeketa’s new General Education Outcomes Self-Assessment.

The assessment asks students applying for graduation to assess their growth in the General Education Outcomes. Between Spring 2024 to Spring 2025, 255 students took the assessment.

At the retreat, discussion participants asked how the results could be disaggregated to show trends among different students, and suggested asking respondents about their next steps. They were particularly interested in students’ comments and wondered whether focus groups might be added to the assessment. They also considered how the results might inform their work with students.

Debriefing after the retreat, LOAC discussed which graduates are included in the assessment. Transfer students are the target audience for now. CTE programs, which administer their own program assessments and are often responsible for certification assessment as well, favored this design when LOAC began this project to meet accreditation standards in 2022.

However, because the self-assessment design does not add to faculty workloads, both LOAC members and faculty in the retreat wondered if the question might be revisited. LOAC members also discussed possibly updating the outcomes.

Ideas You Can Take For A Spin

Not Just a Test: Assessment as a Process

When they see the word “assessment” at a college, most people picture a test or an exam. But when you think about assessment as a process, it becomes a strategy for figuring out what students are absorbing, and using that information to adjust your approaches. The basic steps:

Plan: What are you trying to teach, and how could you tell if students are getting it? One way to think about this step is to identify “observable behaviors” that could help you gauge what students are learning, as Santa Ana College professor Jarek Janio explained last month at Indiana University’s Assessment Institute. Examples: could students explain, describe, state, demonstrate, justify with evidence, perform, apply, show, list, or evaluate using criteria?
Assess: Administer the assessment you chose.
Analyze: What do the results look like? Can you learn from the results what students are absorbing and what they need more help with?
Respond: What adjustments might be helpful? How might you reassess students after you make an adjustment?

Learn Something New: CAI’s Professional Development Opportunities

Interested in exploring new assessment ideas for your classes?

The Assessment Almanac in this issue profiles a new formative assessment that Biology faculty Jennifer Schramm designed to support her goal for general science students: to be able to evaluate scientific information to make a decision. She says CAI courses she took as she was earning Chemeketa’s Excellence in Teaching Certificate taught her strategies for figuring out new ways to approach teaching and assessment.

If this sounds like professional development you’re interested in, check out the CAI microcourses available in Winter Term. Authentic Assessment, for example, walks you through clever assessment strategies you can use as you design your classes.

For Unit Assessment Leads

Communicating with unit faculty about assessment

One of the most important tasks for someone organizing outcomes assessment for a unit is communicating with faculty who need to administer the assessment.

If you haven’t checked them out yet, take a look through these helpful templates that CAI’s Lauren Funderburg developed to support you in that task. The templates can help you make sure you’re covering all the information faculty might need to administer assessments successfully.

Solving Assessment Puzzles

Don’t be alarmed if you see an email from AOE’s Mary Ellen Scofield about an assessment puzzle!

She’s working with CAI’s Lauren Funderburg this year to help units make their assessment dreams come true, as told in their Assessment Plans. Using data from AOE dean Colton Christian, they are helping faculty untangle snags that mean faculty are not getting the data they want into Tableau.

Once they all figure out the crux of the problem, the puzzles are usually simple to solve: a disconnect between the outcomes in our system and the catalog, little needed Canvas tweaks, retired outcomes accidentally copied into assessments.

By solving these puzzles bit by bit, they hope to get faculty better data that they can use for their teaching and that AOE can use to demonstrate faculty’s hard work.

Coming Soon: 2026-29 Assessment Guidelines and Assessment Plan Templates

LOAC members are working this year to update the college’s outcomes assessment guidelines so that they, and the Assessment Plan templates that reflect them, are ready for faculty to use for planning in Spring term.

LOAC develops the guidelines to describe exactly what is expected of faculty for outcomes assessment. The current guidelines, and the current Assessment Plans, were developed to cover 2023-2026. In LOAC’s 2025 spring survey, the majority of respondents indicated they like the guidelines as they are. Given this feedback, while a few components may need updating to reflect changes at the state level, LOAC is seeking to retain the current simple design as much as possible.

If you have ideas about the outcomes assessment guidelines, let a LOAC member know! The project will be completed by the middle of Winter Term so that AOE can use them to develop new Assessment Plan templates to cover 2026-29.

Assessment Almanac:

Getting to the Point: Using Outcomes to Help Students Make Science-Related Decisions

Jennifer Schramm, Life Science Faculty

How can students use what I’m teaching?

This is the key question that Life Science faculty member Jennifer Schramm asks herself when she’s deciding what to do in class. Jennifer teaches using a flipped classroom model, where students learn content for homework and apply it to activities in class. “So I need a lot of activities,” she explained.

To design an activity, she zeros in on the point of what she’s teaching—how the course outcomes will impact students’ lives, well beyond her class. Science majors need a deep understanding of scientific concepts to help them succeed in their STEM goals.

For non-science majors, Jennifer wants students to be able to evaluate scientific information they come across in order to make decisions. If an activity isn’t helping students do that, she changes the activity. “I’m constantly asking, what can I pull in to make the content relevant, so they can see why it’s helpful to learn about science,” she said.

For example, the outcomes for her general science course BI102: General Biology: Cells, Genetics & Evolution include learning about mitosis, or how cells divide. She used to have students learn how it works, “but it felt a dead end,” she said. “They learned about it and then we moved on.”

But mitosis going haywire is cancer, and cancer the second leading cause of death in the United States. So Jennifer moved to teaching mitosis in the context of cancer, and a related decision that many students will face: whether to vaccinate a child to protect against the cancer-causing Human Papillomavirus (HPV).

Students learn how the virus impacts mitosis and the cancers it can lead to. They review images depicting how the virus works, a discovery for which Harald zur Hausen won the Nobel Prize in 2008. They learn how to read and evaluate studies and reports about HPV and the HPV vaccine, and its impact: a significant decline in HPV-related cancer rates since the vaccine was introduced. They interpret visuals about the virus, another outcome the Life Science faculty are currently emphasizing.

Students discuss what they’ve learned in class, and at the end, in an ungraded formative assessment, they write out answers to two questions: What is your opinion about getting the HPV vaccination, and what evidence informs your opinion? “I want them to be able to form an opinion,” she said. “That’s their exit ticket.”

Jennifer dove into the flipped classroom model when the pandemic hit as a strategy to keep students engaged. She liked the results so much, she decided to continue with the approach. “The process of making activities that work well is ongoing,” she said. “I’ve had activities die in the classroom many times — I know that when students call them “busy work.”

She also learned helpful hints for successful activities in workshops as she was earning Chemeketa’s Excellence in Teaching certificate. She typically looks for activities on science education websites she frequents like biologycorner.com, and then adapts them. “Curriculum development is probably my favorite part of teaching,” she says.

“Our general science courses give students exposure and time to think about how science impacts them,” Schramm explained. “My goal is for students to be able to make good decisions about science in their lives.”

LOAC: Where Chemketa’s Assessment Design Happens!

Check out LOAC’s most recent projects on the committee’s Subcommittee Updates document, always posted on the LOAC site. If you’re interested in joining this work, contact chair Nolan Mitchell or chair-elect Odilón Ramirez Javier.

About the Learning Outcomes Assessment Committee at Chemeketa

Faculty-led LOAC works with college departments and committees to design guidelines, processes, and infrastructure that support manageable, meaningful, useful outcomes assessment and results, shaped by faculty to support teaching and learning. Learn more at the LOAC Google Site. Check out our new “Definitions” page to help you get acquainted with outcomes assessment at Chemeketa!

*Acronyms: These departments support LOAC/outcomes assessment and are mentioned many times in this newsletter. Feel free to reach out with questions!

AOE: Academic and Organizational Effectiveness. This department manages our outcomes assessment plans and evidence. Contact academiceffectiveness@chemeketa.edu
IRR: Institutional Research and Reporting. This department, part of AOE, processes outcomes assessment data into Tableau reports. Contact colton.christian@chemeketa.edu
CAI: Center for Academic Innovation. This department manages support for faculty professional development and Canvas outcomes assessment. Contact academicinnovation@chemeketa.edu

Past newsletters

Illustrations by Storyset.com

Page updated

Report abuse