Archived Assessment Report

Not really. And this came up in our most recent department meeting about assessment. Once again, we failed to articulate the development of these skills explicitly to students, and we think we should intertwine the universal theme more broadly into content throughout the semester. This way we can connect our teaching methods to the outcome and reduces speculation. That said, we did meet our goal and them some. We hoped that 65% of our Gen Ed students would be proficient at demonstrating their skill of practicing community. 75% in this last round meet that threshold. However, we have a new faculty working on the assessment data and the faculty member who previously had this task worked independently and the rest of us are not sure how she analyzed the data, dealt with missing data, etc. So the jump in percentage from the last time we assessed could possibly be an artifact of the data. Changes to methodology can often cause changes I the outcome beyond substantive factors.

One change is that we will be in better communication about how to measure the universal themes. We found out in this last round that we had differing ideas and our language for the rubric was vague and jargon filled. Moving forward, we have a plan better organization. Another change made is transparency in the assessment process. This includes more communication with PT instructors on the assessment process, how to conduct the assessment, and why it's important. This way we can ensure a more uniform data outcome.

We learned two main things: First, regarding the assessment tool, we learned that we need to be very specific in how we evaluate the assessments. We all had a vague sense of how our students would demonstrate proficient "practicing community" skills, but when we went to define the exact examples of "proficient" it was hard to articulate. In this next round, we will have clear definitions of we mean when we say "professional skills." And how to incorporate the sociology of it all in the assignment. Second, we learned that we need to ALSO articulate exactly what we mean by "practicing community" to the students. As faculty, we were not all on board with how we described assignments and assessments being connected to the universal theme. We decided we'd like to be more explicit in how the assessment is a way for them to demonstrate a transferable skill, such as practicing community and professional skills. This will also able them to be specific about their developed transferable skills when talking with employers and other educators.

All in all we think our assessment process has gone smoothly. One external issue that impacted our assessment was the change over in faculty. Our data faculty, who was responsible for the SAC report for the last decade retired after the first round of assessment and there was a period of learning that slowed us down as a group. We felt that we spent most of our time trying to reorganize and learn the process to make sure we were on time. And thus we spent too little time discussing the tool itself and how to best measure our outcomes. But now we're on track to have a much more thorough tool and instructions.