Assessment is “a rich conversation about student learning informed by data.” (Source: Ted Marchese, American Association for Higher Education.)
Assessment is realized through cycles of
Establishing clear, measurable expected outcomes of student learning.
Ensuring that students have sufficient opportunities to achieve those outcomes.
Systematically gathering, analyzing, and interpreting evidence to determine how well student learning matches our expectations.
Using the resulting information to understand and improve student learning.
Suskie, Linda A. Assessing Student Learning: A Common Sense Guide. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2009. What does this mean for you as an educator? Assessment is not a one-time operation but an ongoing process. Your department has specific goals for each course as to what a student should know when they complete the course. Your job is to provide students with the opportunities to meet those goals, and then gather and analyze student work to see how well it meets the goals. After this analysis, you determine what if any changes need to be made to help more students to reach the goals, or to achieve at a higher level.
Why is assessment important?
Assessment helps you help students achieve the goals (student learning outcomes) set for your course. And aren't we all here to benefit the students?
SLOs and PLOs - what's the difference?
Assessment applies both to individual courses, and to the programs that the courses feed into (such as the Accounting and the ASNS programs). The individual outcomes for each course are generally referred to as "student learning outcomes" - SLOs - and the outcomes for each program are "program learning outcomes" - PLOs. Faculty are always involved in assessing their own course SLOs, and may also be involved in assessing their program's overall learning outcomes.
Isn't assessment the same thing as grading, which I already do?
Glad you asked. Grading isn't assessment because grading focuses on individual student achievement. How well did Reiko do? What grade did Matt get? Assessment focuses on the entire cohort of students taking all sections of the course. How well are the students in English 100 analyzing and interpreting a literary work? Grades also average out the student learning. If Chris gets a B, is it because she is a B student in all outcomes in the course, or is she an A student in some areas and a D student in others? You can't tell from the final grade alone. Assessment looks at the individual outcomes in a course, for a fine-grained look at specific skills and how well students are learning each one. So while grades contribute to the assessment process, they are not a substitute for it.
What help is available for me in assessing my courses?
The college has two instructional SLO assessment coaches, Anthony Silva for the Arts & Sciences side of the campus and Grant Itomitsu for the CTE side. The coaches provide weekly workshops on assessment topics and are available to meet one on one with you to help with organizing your assessment process, establishing or improving student learning outcomes, creating assessment plans, choosing assessment measures, summarizing and analyzing assessment results, and "closing the loop" - helping you to figure out the next steps after your analysis. A link to the current semester's workshops is on the home page.
The SLO coaches also maintain the "SLO Care Package" (see details under "Resources") to provide you with tools to help with assessment.
What's all this about Taskstream?
The college has transitioned from a paper-based assessment planning and reporting procedure to an online assessment management system, Taskstream. Taskstream training is conducted throughout the academic year; subscribe to the KCC News and Events Bulletin for the latest dates and times. There are also introductory videos available at the "Taskstream" tab above.