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Welcome to 2024-25 from your faculty-led
Learning Outcomes Assessment Committee!
Results and Winners - Spring Faculty Survey About Assessment
Results and Winners - Spring Faculty Survey About Assessment
Last spring, 63 faculty responded to our LOAC survey gathering thoughts and experiences with outcomes assessment. We got a ton of useful information we’ll use in LOAC this fall to plan support for faculty and their outcomes assessment work this coming year. Here’s a brief summary of what faculty said:
Top barriers to making outcomes assessment work well to support teaching/learning
Technical difficulties
Concerns about value
Disagreements over what/how to assess
Time
Top solutions needed for outcomes assessment to work well to support teaching/learning
Troubleshooting/training/support
Dedicated time
Compensation for PT faculty involvement
And now - here are the lucky faculty winners in our participants’ coffee card raffle:
Alexis Butzner, English
Eric Jensen, Physics
Juan Field, Psychology
Kira Sabin, Farm Finance
Mike Myers, Welding
Thanks to everyone who participated!
Assessment Solutions Before You Even Begin?
Assessment Solutions Before You Even Begin?
Want to get your assessments integrated into Canvas before fall? Determined to simplify how you assess learning outcomes in your unit or in a course this year?
Help is here!
Data Tours, Finish-By-Fall Program Reviews, Canvas Assessment Made Simple, and More
When: Wednesday, September 18 (the day after Kick-off) from 9am - 3pm.
Where: Building 6 Room 200
Come to this Drop-In Work Session to work with AOE and CAI staff. They can walk you through reviewing data about your students, simplifying your outcomes, integrating assessments into Canvas course shells, and more — whatever you are interested in doing with your outcomes assessment work this year.
For inspiration, check out this month’s Assessment Almanac at the end of this newsletter.
Special Projects, Assessment Style - LOAC Funded Projects for 2024-25
Special Projects, Assessment Style - LOAC Funded Projects for 2024-25
All five of the academic units that applied for special funding for outcomes assessment projects this year won support through LOAC’s special project fund.
The projects, in brief:
Visual Art - to develop an assessment for Art 115: Basic Design with both full- and part-time faculty input
Life Science- to revise and expand its graphing assessment for all its 100-level Biology courses
English - for full- and part-time faculty to score student writing collected over the three years in Writing 115: Introduction to College Writing to measure the extent to which students across the district are mastering this critical course’s outcomes
History - to conduct a district-wide assessment in History 203: History of the United States, including sections taught by part-time and CCN faculty
Mathematics -to develop rubrics for outcomes for the transferable course Math 105z: Math in Society that could be used for multiple assessments
Academic units are invited to submit funding proposals for special outcomes assessment projects each spring for work that goes “above and beyond” the time and scope of contracts in place. Look for the notice in the spring if you’re curious about a project for your own unit.
Picture this - Outcomes assessment results in Tableau
Picture this - Outcomes assessment results in Tableau
2024 Spring term assessment data is now available for view in Tableau through your employee apps.
To take a look:
Go to Google
Type in this URL: login.chemeketa.edu
Enter your email and password
From the My Chemeketa page, open Employee Apps
Click on the Tableau tile
THEN click here.
If your unit collects assessment data through Canvas or another arrangement with IRR, your students’ results appear in this report.
Wait, what are we supposed to do about learning outcomes assessment again?
Wait, what are we supposed to do about learning outcomes assessment again?
For those of us still charting a course from summer’s glow back to our Chemeketa brains, here’s a TL;DR on outcomes assessment:
Faculty help Chemeketa keep its learning promises to students, better known as the approved Course Learning Outcomes listed in each course description in our college catalog. If you teach a course, plan to help students reach those outcomes, in part by assessing their progress with the outcomes throughout the term. Outcomes can help simplify and focus your planning, and assessments help students understand more about what you are helping them learn and how well they’re doing.
If you happen to be teaching a course listed in your unit’s 3-Year Outcomes Assessment Plan, your program chair will let you know and tell you what to do. Be sure to include that assessment in your plan for the term. The assessments help faculty get a sense for where they can make adjustments to the design of a course or program.
And if you are a program chair, remember to remind your colleagues about planned outcomes assessments for your unit.
PCs/Assessment Coordinators: Not (yet) capturing outcomes assessment results in Canvas? Try Plan B
PCs/Assessment Coordinators: Not (yet) capturing outcomes assessment results in Canvas? Try Plan B
How are you capturing results from the assessments listed in your unit’s 3-Year Outcomes Assessment Plan? If you’re not capturing these results in Canvas, and don’t have another arrangement through IRR, now there’s a Plan B: just send your results to AOE. Read on-
Documenting that our planned assessments are happening is one way we show accreditors the hard work we do to help students learn. With an accreditation visit coming up next spring, AOE wants to make sure we have some kind of documentation for everyone.
Using Canvas is a great option for capturing and documenting results from outcomes assessments because -
It can simplify getting your students’ results reported
You can see and compare results over time
You can explore disaggregated results, by gender, age, or ethnicity, for example
But as it's currently configured, using Canvas for this purpose doesn’t always make sense for every unit. Even when it does, it can take some experimenting to get it to work right.
Enter Plan B. If you’re not using Canvas to capture the assessment results, you can email whatever documentation you have to Colton Christian or Mary Ellen Scofield in AOE. Title your email: (Unit name) assessment results for (Term/Year).
If you’re not sure what documentation would work, no worries; Mary Ellen will be reaching out this term to help units without documentation figure out what they could use. And then, when you have a little breathing room, or maybe for your next program review, AOE and CAI can help you decide if and how to configure your assessments in Canvas.
General Education Outcomes in the College Catalog
General Education Outcomes in the College Catalog
You may remember that last year, LOAC developed new General Education Outcomes for the college. These are intended to summarize the learning that general education faculty strive to cultivate for their students in their courses. The outcomes align with both state and accreditation expectations, but they are Chemeketa’s own.
Here’s the list:
Curiosity
Creativity
Critical Thinking
Communication
Competence
Compassion
You can read more detailed descriptions of these outcomes in our new online college catalog.
Last spring, LOAC piloted an initial proof-of-concept student self-assessment about these outcomes. Approximately ten percent of graduates completed the assessment.
Still to come: LOAC will review the results to plan next steps for using the outcomes. Members have discussed, for example, how the outcomes might be introduced to incoming students, how to use them in the student experience at Chemeketa, and how to expand and possibly add to the self-assessment.
Assessment Curious? Wellness Fair Assessment Table
Assessment Curious? Wellness Fair Assessment Table
Assessment at the Wellness Fair? Yes! Our LOAC Communication Subcommittee member Raschel Larsen came up with this brilliant idea. The LOAC-sponsored Assess the Situation table will be featured in this year’s Wellness Fair. The fair starts at 10 a.m. right after Kickoff on Tuesday, September 17.
Come self-assess your cell phone usage, your stress coping capacities, or your knowledge about assessment at Chemeketa for a chance to win a stress-buster from the Bookstore. We’ll have bookmarks help you use assessment to improve any area of your life, and analog slider puzzles to help anyone interested in spending less time using a screen.
Fall Kickoff Assessment Almanac:
Fall Kickoff Assessment Almanac:
Horticulture Prunes and Propagates Its Outcomes and Assessments
Horticulture Prunes and Propagates Its Outcomes and Assessments
Joleen Schilling, Horticulture Program Chair
Chemeketa’s resident genius gardener and Horticulture Program Chair Joleen Schilling has been growing opportunities for students and faculty in many and various ways.
In 2019-20, Schilling started Chemeketa Gardens for students to be able to grow and sell plants for community organizations and businesses, and it now counts City of Salem and Deepwood Estates among its 9 contracts, with sales topping $50,000 a year. Schilling also developed a summer workshop to help high school teachers prepare students for success in our Horticulture program that has filled two summers in a row.
And for her next project? Believe it or not, she chose outcomes and assessment. In her last program review, Schilling decided she’d like to review Horticulture’s outcomes and assessments in light of changing industry trends. She also wanted to integrate her unit assessments into Canvas. This would make it easier for her and her colleagues to collect results and compare them over time.
She outlined the project for Horticulture’s 2024-25 unit plan, then Schilling, who is on a full-year contract, worked with Lauren Funderburg in the Center for Academic Innovation this summer to get the project done. They talked through her program outcomes and the course outcomes for the course she wanted to use for the unit’s outcomes assessment. Once that was done, they integrated the outcomes and assessments into Canvas.
As of Fall 2024, the Horticulture faculty will begin collecting outcomes assessment data through Canvas for the first time.
Joleen says she is pleased with the results. “I realized through this process why it’s really important to do this,” she said. “It helps you really ask: Are we meeting the needs of our students? What do our students need to know exactly? Do these outcomes and these assessments really help us ask the questions we want to answer?”
Have an outcomes assessment story you would like to share? Let LOAC know! Email Mary Ellen Scofield so we can feature the story in a future Assessment Almanac.
*Acronyms: These departments support LOAC/outcomes assessment and are mentioned many times in this newsletter. Feel free to reach out with questions!
*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
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!
Illustrations by Storyset.com
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