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Don’t forget: Winter outcomes assessments, and prepare for Spring!
Don’t forget: Winter outcomes assessments, and prepare for Spring!
If you are teaching a class that includes one of your program’s/discipline’s outcomes assessments, remember to administer the assessment to students before the end of the term. If you are unsure if you need to conduct an outcomes assessment, check with your program chair.
Many programs/disciplines also start preparing now for outcomes assessments they want to administer in the spring, particularly in capstone courses. Setting up a way to communicate with all the faculty who teach the course you’re using for your unit’s outcomes assessment can help expand the number of students who participate in the assessment. For example, English emails all its faculty early in the term with a common assessment they will use in their courses.
Also remember to set up a way to collect outcomes assessment results your faculty can review together. Many units collect outcomes assessment results through Canvas, but you can also provide AOE with alternative evidence that the assessment occurred/results from the year. For example, Welding provides AOE with a picture of the capstone projects their students complete and the evaluations they get from professional welders. Early Childhood Education faculty record their outcomes assessment results in their unit’s Assessment Plan.
All of these ideas help units follow LOAC’s assessment guidelines. The faculty-led LOAC leads outcomes assessment at Chemeketa, making sure the work is faculty-driven, manageable, leads to meaningful, usable information about student learning, and helps the college meet accreditation standards.
If you have questions or need help with your outcomes assessments, contact Mary Ellen Scofield or Kim Colantino in AOE, or academicinnovation@chemeketa.edu to reach CAI faculty.
New resources for faculty on the LOAC site
New resources for faculty on the LOAC site
Because LOAC governs Chemeketa’s approach to outcomes assessment, its communications subcommittee is always looking for ways to help faculty figure out what’s expected and how to get meaningful, usable results from this work.
Here are tools we’ve recently developed and added to the LOAC site for this purpose:
New Resources. We’ve added a compendium of our colleagues’ Assessment Stories featured in our newsletters, instructions for linking outcomes to courses/assignments in Canvas, and our new General Education Outcomes.
Comprehensive Assessment Overview. For anyone in a leadership role for an academic unit, this new table outlines the “universe” of how outcomes assessment is documented at Chemeketa, centering faculty innovation, expertise, and choice while also aligning with accreditation standards. The Comprehensive Overview shows how we document and highlight the ways faculty use assessment to support student learning and inform their teaching.
Coming soon: Canvas Course with outcomes assessment support
Coming soon: Canvas Course with outcomes assessment support
LOAC is creating a Canvas course that will offer a range of support for outcomes assessment. It will appear on faculty dashboards by the end of this academic year.
The course shell is the brainchild of Math faculty Odilon Ramirez Javier, and CAI faculty Lauren Funderburg is heading up the project. Features will include instructions for linking Canvas outcomes to courses and assignments, alternative approaches to outcomes assessment, and examples of assignments that build the General Education Outcomes. As a preview, Lauren has also put the outcomes-linking steps into a document that is now linked on the LOAC site.
If you have other ideas for information that could be useful to faculty in this course shell, email academiceffectiveness@chemeketa.edu, and the LOAC communications committee will work with it!
General education outcomes news
General education outcomes news
Assessment Liaison Kim Colantino, LOAC chair Nolan Mitchell, and AOE dean Colton Christian have made great strides with assessing and promoting Chemeketa’s new general education outcomes this winter. Highlights:
Self-assessment on graduation form. Kim worked with Elizabeth Bay, the college Registrar, to integrate a link to the General Education Outcomes Self-Assessment in the form students fill out to apply for graduation with a transfer degree. The change appears to be improving the percentage of students who are taking the assessment, surpassing the initial 10% of graduates who took the assessment last spring. This Spring, LOAC will review the assessment’s results and create a plan to share and discuss them with general education faculty at large. The committee will also decide whether they want to modify the assessment for 2025-26.
Marketing Chemeketa’s General Education Outcomes. Kim worked with Robert LaHue in Marketing to finalize an image summarizing the outcomes that Nolan developed last fall. Together, they developed a college webpage highlighting the outcomes. Next, they will identify the best places to link the page on the college website.
Integrating General Education Outcomes into the student experience. Colton is working with Student Affairs Executive Dean Manuel Guerra Perez to identify new ways to introduce students to the outcomes. Plans include displaying the outcomes on the college’s screens in public spaces, integrating them into student orientation, and translating them into Spanish.
Bright assessment idea? Special projects funding for 2025-26
Bright assessment idea? Special projects funding for 2025-26
Have you ever thought you’d like to try out a different approach to outcomes assessment for your program/discipline? (see this issue’s Assessment Almanac for one such story.)
Now is a great time to sketch out innovative outcomes assessment ideas that could benefit from some extra funding. There are two funding opportunities for faculty who might be interested in pursuing an assessment project that goes beyond normal faculty duties.
The Chemeketa Innovation Grants program is accepting applications until April 1 for projects that help promote the college mission by aligning with the themes, indicators, and metrics in the Strategic Plan & Scorecard and that have measurable outcomes. Assessment projects are eligible for the program. For example, Marg Yaroslaski, Program Chair for the BAS Leadership program, won a CIG grant to articulate and highlight in a competition the competencies that students build in career technical coursework. Proposals can be for up to $10,000.
Each spring the Vice President of Academic and Student Affairs allots funds to LOAC to distribute for innovative special outcomes assessment projects for the upcoming year. LOAC will distribute its Request for Proposals in Spring term, and will select projects by June and award them in the new fiscal year in July.
Think it over! Maybe you’d like to do an assessment project with your colleagues, assessment research over the summer, or pay adjunct faculty beyond the means of your department to participate in an assessment event.
LOAC’s guidelines let faculty and units choose their strategies for assessing how well students are mastering the learning outcomes we promise in our catalog’s course and program descriptions. The world is your (assessment) oyster!
Join the LOAC design team! Faculty decide how assessment happens
Join the LOAC design team! Faculty decide how assessment happens
To stay accredited, colleges need a system to demonstrate that faculty assess student learning and make improvements in response to results. At most colleges, administrators in an assessment office design a system that faculty follow to do this work. At Chemeketa, faculty are the outcomes assessment system designers.
LOAC members research, propose, and vote on directions to take with assessment. An Assessment Liaison, a half-time faculty release position, works with the AOE dean and LOAC to support the work as well.
The Liaison and other LOAC members work with PCs, deans, executive deans, AOE, CAI, and other departments to carry out the work and vet ideas so that decisions gain support and align with available resources. They create guidelines for manageable, meaningful outcomes assessment that inform teaching. They also create communication tools and conduct research to support their designs.
Doesn’t that sound fun? Join us! We are in particular need of CTE representatives to ensure that LOAC designs make sense for CTE faculty. LOAC meets six times between September and June, twice a term, for a total of 9 hours. Subcommittees work on special projects, such as research or communications. If you are interested, contact anyone in AOE, or write academiceffectiveness@chemeketa.edu.
Assessment Almanac:
Assessment Almanac:
Apples to Apples: A Better Design for History Outcomes Assessment
Apples to Apples: A Better Design for History Outcomes Assessment
Traci Hodgson, Social Sciences and History Program Chair
A few years ago, History Program Chair Traci Hodgson decided she was not totally happy with her disciplines’ outcomes assessment design.
“We were selecting outcomes for our faculty to assess, and leaving it up to them to decide how to assess them,” she said. The difficulty lay in the results themselves; they were hard to compare from section to section because most everyone approached assessing the outcomes in a different way, and it was difficult to coordinate gathering results. “The process was cumbersome and the results were hard to understand,” Traci explained.
She knew that English was seeing success in its assessment approach. English faculty conduct outcomes assessment in their writing courses, and ask every instructor to use the same outcomes assessment materials. The process communicates expectations and results in comparable student artifacts. Faculty then score students’ artifacts using a common rubric.
History was attracted not only to the idea of giving every student the same assessment in every section, but also to giving College Credit Now students “the chance to see one of our College professors in action,” Traci explained. For the assignment they decided to use one of the recorded lectures by History professor Taylor Morrow, an expert in Civil Rights History, and have students respond to it. She and Taylor would then read and score the student artifacts together after the academic year was over.
Traci applied for special funding from LOAC to try out the idea as a “proof of concept” project in 2023-24 for History 203: History of the United States, a course taught only in Spring, to make the numbers of sections manageable.
Traci and Taylor were pleased with the results when they finished. Almost half of the students who took the course completed the assessment. Student artifacts resulting from the same assignment were much easier to compare. “We were able to compare “apples to apples,’” Traci said. They also learned that student work appeared to be similar no matter where they took the course, and they confirmed that students appear to struggle with historical analysis.
They also found there were challenges they would like to solve. They discussed ways to improve the assignment itself, and ways to streamline how the assignment is integrated into the student experience to get a higher percentage of students completing it.
They applied for LOAC funding to try some of the improvements they would like to make, and will conduct the assessment again at the end of spring term. They also are exploring how to work with faculty to build students’ analytical writing skills. Overall, they are happy with the change. “The rubric is tight; the question we asked is good,” said Traci. “There are tweaks we want to make, but we like this assessment better.”
About the Learning Outcomes Assessment Committee at Chemeketa
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
*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
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