Fall 2001 * Volume 4 * Number 1

A NOTE FROM THE CO-CHAIRS OF THE ASSESSMENT COMMITTEE

In This Issue

In this issue of the Assessment Newsletter we provide one article examining assessment of the General Education program and one departmental assessment report-how the Education Department revised its assessment plan. The purpose of the Assessment Newsletter, this issue and those preceding it, is to enhance the conversation about assessment on campus. The articles are meant to inform. We hope these brief reports make the campus more aware of assessment activities on campus. The articles, at the risk of sounding corny, are also meant to inspire. I hope you will find some interesting assessment techniques that you can modify to fit your own department's goals.

ASSESSMENT 101

Scott VanderStoep, Chila Alvarez-Ruf, and Jeremy Billetdeaux attended the Assessment Institute at IUPUI in Indianapolis on November 4-5. Among the many interesting discussions was a session on implementing an assessment plan. Good assessment, the workshop presenters proposed, should have three components:

1. Learning Goals: What do you want your students to learn?
2. Methods of Gathering Evidence: How do you know if your students are learning?
3. Feedback: How does the information you gathered inform your teaching and curriculum decisions?

This workshop served as a refreshing reminder that good assessment does not need to mean collecting more information from students. Although there are times when an alumni survey, a senior exit interview, or a student-satisfaction questionnaire would be helpful to a department, this workshop was an important reminder to all of us that good assessment is more a matter of using the information you have than it is collecting more information (that you might not ever use). The article in this issue on the Education Department's assessment plan makes this point well-the information they are collecting is collected as part of the students' normal coursework. The distinctive feature is that the information is used to inform teaching and cirriculum decisions.

REMEMBER THOSE LEVELS?

More people have commented to me (SV) about the joke I made at our Faculty Business Meeting at the start of the semester than about my reminder regarding departmental assessment. Last semester each department chair classified their department in terms of its progress on assessment. We have used the NCA rubric of Level I, Level II, and Level III as our classification scheme.

Read more of this article

OTHER ARTICLES IN THIS ISSUE

Academic Affairs Board Assessment of General Education

Developing an Assessment Plan: A Case Study from the Education Department