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Quarterly Communication: Winter '24
Quarterly Communication: Winter '24
Reminder! Administer Winter Term outcomes assessments
Reminder! Administer Winter Term outcomes assessments
If you are teaching a course that includes an outcomes assessment for your unit, be sure you’ve administered the required assessment before the end of Winter Term. As our Assessment Almanac story demonstrates below, when units have assessment results to work with, they can see how their students are faring, and they can use the information to make decisions to help students succeed.
Not sure if your courses require outcomes assessments this term? Check with your program chair.
Wait, What Are We Supposed to be Assessing Again?
Wait, What Are We Supposed to be Assessing Again?
Confused about what’s expected for assessing outcomes these days? Your faculty friends in the LOAC Communications subcommittee are here to help:
Assess outcomes every year: As a unit, plan out outcomes assessment in your Three-Year Assessment Plans (located in these folders) and carry out your plan:
Assess your unit’s selected course outcomes every year
All academic units except General Education: Assess all your program outcomes for at least one primary degree or certificate over the course of three years (2023-26)
General Education units: You are no longer required to assess “program-level” outcomes. Instead, LOAC is working on creating and assessing General Education Outcomes (see story below).
Review and respond to the results with your colleagues, and document what happened in your Three-Year Assessment Plans. (Assessment results are now on Tableau! Read story below.)
Questions?
The Chemeketa Student Outcomes Assessment Guidelines that LOAC refined last year spells out the details.
The Quick Guide with all the steps to take for outcomes assessment work helps you track your progress.
More questions? Contact Julie Peters, Academic and Organizational Effectiveness Dean, whator Jeremy Trabue, this year’s Assessment Coordinator.
What do Chemeketa students learn in our general education courses? That’s the question several of our LOAC members dove into researching last year in order to draft new General Education Outcomes for the college.
This month, they unveiled their answer:
Curiosity
Creativity
Critical Thinking
Communication
Competence
Compassion
The team also drafted extended definitions for each outcome, as well as an introduction and a FAQ sheet for the project. The list will help us meet accreditation standards, but more importantly, they will articulate to our community skills that students can expect to build in our general education courses.
Our assessment coordinator and LOAC Chair have been collecting feedback about the drafted outcomes to consider as they prepare for LOAC’s March meeting, when the members will consider a final draft for approval. The next step will be to design assessments for these outcomes, which we’ll begin piloting this Spring.
If you have feedback regarding the proposed outcomes or their descriptions, we’d love to hear from you. Contact Jeremy Trabue or Nolan Mitchell with your thoughts.
Assessment Data Gets A Makeover
Assessment Data Gets A Makeover
Ever puzzled over where and when you can review outcomes assessment results for your program or discipline? Puzzle no more! Our fabulous Institutional Research and Reporting team has transitioned all our outcomes assessment data into Tableau, located here. (Read our next story for instructions to get into the report. Contact Colton Christian (colton.christian@chemeketa.edu) or Beth Holscher (beth.holscher@chemeketa.edu if you need help.)
Tableau makes it easier to review and disaggregate your assessment data, and it will be available within a couple of weeks of the end of any term, once grades are in. Collecting this information through Canvas will get you detailed information about how your students fare on your outcomes assessments, and helps us demonstrate this work to accreditors and other stakeholders.
You may notice: many fewer assessment results (about half as many) were recorded in Fall 2023 than Fall 2022. This could be due to any number of factors, from revamped Three-Year Assessment Plans to course sections that were cut. However, if you find yourself surprised that your program/discipline recorded fewer results, just contact Julie Peters or Jeremy Trabue to sort it out. They can route you to whatever help your unit may need if you thought assessments happened this last fall that are not showing up in the report.
And shout out to the Accounting faculty, who gathered assessment results through Canvas for the first time! Read details about their success story in our Assessment Almanac below. WooHoo!
And just in case…
And just in case…
How to Get to Your Canvas-reported Unit Outcomes Assessment Data
How to Get to Your Canvas-reported Unit Outcomes Assessment Data
Not able to see the new Assessment Data Tableau report described above? If you haven’t looked at Tableau or data on our Institutional Research and Reporting page before, the first time around takes just a few minutes to get into the system:
Log into Chemeketa Single Sign On, select Chemeketa Connects, select the Services menu, and select Institutional Research and Reporting.
Click on the Data Reports tile to find Academic Unit/Program Data. The assessment data is linked at the bottom of that page
When asked to log in to Tableau, follow these instructions for logging in (Briefly: use the same email you use when you log into Chemeketa Single Sign On, like this: mscofie4@chemeketa.edu.)
If you have any trouble at all, contact Colton Christian (colton.christian@chemeketa.edu) or Beth Holscher (beth.holscher@chemeketa.edu) and they will get you set up.
Help with Assessment? Tech Hub to the Rescue!
Help with Assessment? Tech Hub to the Rescue!
The Tech Hub Team is here to help you with your outcomes assessment needs.
Solve Canvas Assessment Puzzles
Want to integrate your outcomes assessments into Canvas, or help your part-time faculty to do this, so you can report and disaggregate results? Want to reconfigure or redesign your outcomes assessments in Canvas? Contact the Center for Academic Innovation, and a Tech Hub faculty team member will reach out to help you join the Canvas Assessment Multiverse. Recent examples: Accounting worked with Tech Hub faculty to redesign their outcomes assessment approach this year, and Art invited Tech Hub faculty to help part-time faculty integrate assessments into their Canvas shells during a faculty meeting and after.
Coming This Spring! CAI Micro Course: Leveraging Assessment for Learning
Join this short course spring term to learn about ways you can use assessments and alignment strategies to impact student learning. You’ll work with concepts like backwards and transparent design, and how you can use the Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT) framework to refine and clarify assessments and other assignments. The course covers concepts that can help you design or redesign assessments to help you learn more about your students’ learning.
Questions? Contact Lauren in the Tech Hub (lauren.funderburg@chemeketa.edu).
Assessment Almanac
Assessment Almanac
Accounting Gets Its Assessment Counts
Accounting Gets Its Assessment Counts
Story from Lana Tuss, Accounting Program Chair
When Chemeketa first transitioned to Canvas in Fall 2020, the Accounting faculty dove into transitioning their outcomes assessments into Canvas. However, there was no way to test whether the new tool was working correctly, and, much to their dismay, at the end of that academic year when they reviewed the data, they found that it was flawed and unusable.
“We were very cautious” about retesting the Canvas reporting waters after that fiasco, Lana said. But two years later, they decided during their program review to try again.
The Tech Hub faculty worked with the program full-time faculty early in Fall 2023l to create a Canvas Accounting Outcomes Assessment master course shell containing all program outcomes, assessed at the course level. The master shell includes modules faculty can easily drop into their courses with detailed assessment information, instructions, and related rubrics. The master shell is maintained and updated by full-time program faculty.
The new design worked! Accounting’s two full-time and five part-time faculty were able to collect valuable assessment results for Fall 2023, for a total of 121 data points.
This week, Lana had her first glimpse of this data in newly configured Tableau reports from IRR (described in the story above.) “This is great!” she said. She was particularly taken by being able to see results in different modalities of the same course. She hopes to use the information to help her program with course modality scheduling decisions they are currently making for next year.
“You can really see the differences between assessment results in the offered modalities,” Lana said. “And receiving the data sooner, rather than at the end of the year, will help us with program and course level adjustments.”
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!
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