News

Quarterly Communication: Fall '23

We thought a little assessment humor would start off your holiday season right...

Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes, January 09, 1995

‘Tis the Assessment Season

Before the end of fall term, remember to conduct any student learning outcomes assessments you are slated to administer in your courses, and report the results to your unit. Need help? Contact Academic and Organizational Effectiveness.

Use your unit’s Three-Year Assessment Plan, located in your unit’s planning and assessment folder, to track your unit assessment activities during the year. In the plan, find the yellow-headings marked “2023-24 Activities, Results & Next Steps” by scrolling over from where you listed your selected outcomes and assessments.

Jot down notes about fall term activities. Did assessments happen as planned? What did the results look like? If your unit faculty have already met to discuss results, what did you learn/decide?

screenshot of unit plan assessment folder

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Where are our assessment results again? What can I do with them?

If you are looking for your SLO assessment results, look no further! They are here, updated through Spring 2023, and always accessible on this LOAC site page.

You can experiment with looking at results by age differences, writing or math placements, gender, race/ethnicity, etc., which is helpful for seeing if certain groups of students are having more trouble or success than others. What can faculty do about such “gaps”? Here are some ideas. This Chronicle for Higher Education article is in our Center for Academic Innovation’s curated Library Guide, under Inclusive Teaching and Learning resources.

Also on the assessment results front: this data will be transitioning to Tableau sometime this year, thanks to the hard work of the Institutional Research and Reporting team. This should make it easier to view the data in the ways you want.

Unit Plan, Assessment Plan, So Many Plans…

When teaching and students are the heart of your days, but you’re also helping with unit planning, review and documentation we need for accreditation, all those document names can blend and blur. Here’s a handy-dandy guide. All these “live” in one place: your unit’s planning and assessment folder:

Unit Plans: Annual plans of improvement projects for your unit, due by June and reviewed with your supervisor by September. Every year, include at least one project to improve student learning outcomes assessment for your unit in some way.

Three-Year Assessment Plans: Every three years, units use these spreadsheets to outline how faculty will formally assess course student learning outcomes, and program outcomes if you offer a CTE or discipline-specific certificate or degree. Each year, report here what happened with your outlined assessment activities.

Program Reviews: In our new condensed process, program reviews will happen every three years in the fall. In them, units review and summarize their plans’ results: improvements, student learning outcomes assessment strategy, and status of unit-specific data. At the end of this review, units identify priorities for the next three years.

Projects, projects, projects: Making Assessment Bright

Our faculty-led Learning Outcomes Assessment Committee is always working to brighten the assessment landscape with great design and support. Here’s what we’re working on this year:

What is a general education made of?

We are developing new general education learning outcomes and a pilot process to assess them. Our project is detailed in this white paper.

Keep It Simple! Assessment Language

The LOAC Communications subcommittee this year is developing new tools to help faculty understand how and why we design a student learning outcomes assessment system, and learn more about helpful, useful, meaningful student learning outcomes assessment practices. Stay tuned!

Giving you a hand

Our Peer-to-Peer Support subcommittee is working to distinguish between the support faculty need if they’re working on assessment for their whole academic unit and if they’re working on assessment for their individual classes. They’ll develop support for each type of assessment needs.

Herding Assessment Cats: Faculty Release Coordinator

This budget season, we’re proposing permanent funding for a rotating half-time faculty release position to coordinate student learning outcomes assessment work, plus stable funding for assessment mini-grants and other assessment support. We’ve been piloting this model for three years with great success, with Jeremy Trabue (English) in the role. The approach puts faculty in the driver’s seat, coordinating projects to support meaningful, effective, widespread SLO assessment in partnership with LOAC and the many departments to support that work.

Assessment as your best teacher friend

Odilon Ramirez Javier (Math) and Debra VanHouten (Life Science) on our LOAC Communication subcommittee were talking this week about how you can always play around with informal assessment experiments for any kind of learning you’re curious about. What do you want to know about what your students are learning? You can design an assessment to see how they’re doing with any particular skill or knowledge. Here are lots of good resources with assessment ideas from the Center for Academic Innovation.

Or check out our Assessment Almanac story below for inspiration! Melissa VanDyke is a grand assessment experimenter in her Medical Assisting program.

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Assessment Almanac

How much practice does it take to learn a skill? Assessment helps us decide

Melissa VanDyke, Medical Assisting Program Chair

In our Medical Assisting program on the Yamhill campus, students need to deeply learn the skills we are teaching them. If they don’t, the consequences could be a matter of life and death for a patient.

At the same time, our students have just ten weeks to prepare to enter clinicals in their second term, so they have to learn many skills quickly. So we are always looking for the right balance between helping students learn skills deeply, and helping them learn a lot of skills. Assessment helps us do that.

To teach students each skill, we:

Show them step-by-step what to do
Give them a study guide with a step-by-step checklist of these instructions
Have them practice the skill a set number of times
Give them time to complete the required number of practices
Have them demonstrate the skill to us

Students can feel overwhelmed by #3, the number of times they need to practice skills. We check in about their progress and stress levels throughout the term. If we find students are having trouble meeting practice session minimums for a skill, we experiment with adjusting those minimums. When we adjust a minimum down, we then see if students are still able to successfully demonstrate the skill to us. If so, we adjust that minimum down for the next time we teach the class.

For example, to help students learn how to give injections, we have them complete 15 sets of three practice injections. We have experimented with dropping that minimum down, and then the next week, checking if students were able to accurately demonstrate the skill to us. If they were not, we adjusted the minimums back up.

Experiments like this help us to find the right balance between helping students deeply learn each skill and learn all the skills they need to become highly competent practitioners, ready to work in a health care setting near you. Who knows? They could be giving you your next shot!

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.

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