Assessment Coordinators 

Assessment Coordinator Gwen Telgenhoff works with faculty teaching Biology 120:  Environmental Science. This course has multiple sections and is taught in several modalities, including online, hybrid, and face-to-face. 

This course uses a common assessment quiz, given via D2L, as a department final, to measure student performance across student learning outcomes. 

The team collects data in a variety of ways. They look at the overall assessment grade as well as student performance for each student learning outcome. This data is used to analyze student learning. 

Faculty noticed that student learning is happening similarly across modalities. They observed that the success of some student learning outcomes is greater than others, leading them to analyze more deeply. This led to a discussion about question clarity, differences in terminology in the textbook versus the quiz questions, and even emphasis across all sections of the course. Faculty committed to reflect, adjust, and recognize where more clarity can be provided to the students throughout the course to improve their learning experience. 

Upon review of the assessment data, faculty also discovered some student learning outcomes may not reflect the learning as desired by the course. This has led to discussions about updating learning outcomes to better fit the course.

The data collection has since been expanded to include assessment performance, course grade, modality, gender, race/ethnicity, and student learning outcomes across semesters.

Assessment Coordinator Nicole Olszowy works with faculty teaching Physics 120: The Art of Physics. This course has multiple sections and is taught in several modalities, including online, hybrid, and face-to-face. 

This course has two common assessment methods used to collect outcome assessment data: a paper and common questions on all unit exams. These are aligned with four student learning outcomes. 

The faculty teaching the course code their gradebooks by using an agreed upon, common naming convention in each section. They also use a coding system in the question description in D2L that designates the outcome, chapter, and question number.  Both of these aid in the ease of data collection, sorting, and support a more detailed analysis of student learning. 

Through the collected data, faculty gained an understanding of how their students were learning, down to the test question. In addition, they looked at a number of factors, including time of day of the class (afternoon or evening), gender, age, ethnicity, major, modality, course grade, and day of week.  The faculty for PHYS 120 found this data useful in the analysis for each of their required unit exam questions in terms of reliability and validity of the questions, and they found the process relatively simple, after the initial set-up of the questions.  After the coding system was set up in the exam questions, the faculty simply had to download exam spreadsheets from D2L and send it to the Assessment Coordinator.