We’ve Looked at Art from Both Sides Now

From Heidi Grew, Art Faculty

The Art faculty have been conducting outcomes assessment for many years (AAOT and rotating course outcomes, and program outcomes we wrote a few years ago), and this has helped us understand student performance. However, we have approached the work in two very different ways over the last 7 years, and each approach has given us different insights.

Before 2020, we would choose course outcomes that were somewhat similar each year that could apply to multiple courses/course outcomes. This would be, for example, Effective Use of Composition. Courses addressing a variety of art mediums had course outcomes that related to this selected theme. 

To assess outcomes, our full-and part-time faculty (with help of studio assistant staff) would submit images of student work from multiple courses into a shared Google folder, and we randomly selected up to 80 art works for a group scoring session. We gathered once or twice a year to discuss the assessment goals/process and review the work. We “normed” together to see how each of us might grade a selected artwork for that particular theme. This approach to outcomes assessment taught us several things:

We found that we had relatively similar, aligned principles we were using in evaluating student artwork. 

We found from time to time that artwork from a particular assignment was consistently not as successful as other student work, and this led to assignment revisions that could better support student learning about these themes. 

We gained a stronger understanding of the breadth of work students were producing, which helped all of us identify ways we could better support learning as we worked with students throughout the year.

This approach changed in 2020. The pandemic had begun, the college could no longer consistently fund PT faculty time to review student work, and there was an interest/capability of scoring student work within Canvas and getting disaggregated results. So for the 2020-2023 Three-Year Assessment Plan cycle, PT faculty participated when funded, and this year, only FT Art faculty scored student work, and we did so within our courses. We selected common program outcomes and/or AAOT outcomes as the base for our assessments, plus rotating course outcomes for each class. Because we had the experience of the face-to-face norming of our grading practices the previous several years, we did not norm our grading of student work together over the course of the pandemic.

The best part of this approach has been that we are able to see disaggregated results and gain insights from them. We were able to see that high school students in dual enrollment courses scored very well in comparison to the older college students. We could also see that students taking art remotely were passing at rates as high as our face-to-face students. These findings contradicted our concerns about these particular groups of students.

In our next Three-Year Assessment Plan, we are considering how we might gain some of the usefulness of our early approach reviewing students work with all our faculty, and combine that with benefits of the Canvas-scoring approach. We have found the AAOT outcomes to be only moderately useful in helping us understand how students are developing specific skills, and so we look forward to focusing again on course outcomes plus possibly program outcomes instead.