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 “Program Chairs' Corner”!

Past newsletters

Assessment Ideas for the New Year

Being able to understand graphs is an important skill both in a STEM field and in everyday life. However, following COVID-19 learning losses, and seeing students puzzled when faced with a graph, Biology faculty wanted to know: how exactly are our 100-level Biology students’ graph literacy skills faring, and what help might students need?

“We noticed that some students were really good at this and some had no idea what to do,” said project lead and Biology faculty Jonathan Christie. “We decided the best plan would be to get some data to really see where students are.”

The team was also looking for a unit assessment project that could help them understand student learning across more than one course, one possible way to meet LOAC’s outcomes assessment guidelines.

The faculty decided to measure their students’ graph literacy skills in all their 100-level Biology courses to get comprehensive baseline data. Their highest enrollment course at that level is BI112: Cell Biology for Health Organizations, with approximately eight sections per term, and they offer eight additional 100-level courses.

Jonathan headed up the project to develop a 10-question graph reading assessment. Then they worked with CAI’s Lauren Funderburg to integrate the assessment into Biology’s 100-level courses through Canvas so they could see the results in Tableau.

Faculty piloted the assessment with a small number of students in Summer and Fall 2024, then rolled it out for all 100-level students in Winter 2025, amassing results from 181 students. Jonathan’s colleague Zac Kohl disaggregated this data and led a program discussion at inservice to analyze it and consider how to respond.

100-level W25 Biology Student Performance on Graph Literacy Assessment (updated version)

Faculty learned from Zac’s analysis that more students were succeeding with the assessment than they had expected; approximately 70% of students could correctly answer 8 out of the assessment’s 10 questions.

“We were surprised by the results,” Jonathan said.  "Our original hypothesis was students would do poorly or some would do very well and others very badly.  Instead, we saw a majority of students were getting these questions correct, some with over 90% success." 

The faculty decided that the results did not point to a learning emergency they needed to address right away. They decided to modify two questions most students struggled with (Questions 5 and 7), continue the assessment for another year, and see if they could gain more insights from a larger data set. 

They also shared the information with their Math faculty colleagues. Reading graphs has been a skill covered in developmental math courses such as Math 20 and 60, whose funding is sunsetting in the state. Math faculty Keith Schloeman, program chair at the time, said the project and its results added to their conversations about how to support students needing math skills review when the state is moving away from traditional developmental courses. One idea they have explored: a math review module that science faculty could insert into Canvas course shells as needed.

This coming fall inservice, the Biology faculty will again review the assessment’s results, now from more than 2,000 students, and decide how to respond to them. The initial results signaled to faculty that adding graph reading skills to the existing, already packed 100-level curriculum is probably not the right call. 

“It may be that tutoring is the best direction for helping students with these skills, since it is not a challenge for the majority of our students,” Jonathan said.

Jonathan said for next steps with the project, he is curious about two things: graph literacy among 200-level students—who need more in-depth and content-specific agility with graphs—and graph building skills. “In other words: can a student make an accurate graph and not just analyze one?” he explained. 

For now, Jonathan says they will likely continue with the 100-level graph literacy assessment. “Continually assessing helps us understand where students are,” he said. “Then we decide what to do next.”