RE: Assessment

Course on Classroom Assesment Techniques To Be Offered in Winter Quarter

Rosemary McKinney will offer a faculty development course entitled Classroom Assessment Techniques during the upcoming Winter Quarter. The class will meet on nine consecutive Thursday afternoons from 1:30 to 4:30 pm, starting January 16 and ending on March 13.

Based on the Cross and Angelo text, the course will offer the opportunity to learn about and experiment with a wide variety of CAT's. Participants may opt for one semester credit (1.5 quarter hours), which involves attendance, participation, and completion of the reading assignments, or two semester credits (3 quarter hours) by completing all of the above plus a special project.

This should be a good way to learn more about classroom assessment techniques, to decide which technique(s) may be most useful for your particular teaching assignment, to share ideas and experiences with colleagues, and to earn credit, too. Interested faculty are encouraged to enroll as soon as possible.

Share Your Experience

Just as Oprah sometimes advertises that she is seeking guests willing to go public concerning a particular issue, the Outcomes Assessment Committee would like more COD faculty to come forward and share their experiences with assessment, just as Nancy Conradt did in issue 2 and Dick Voss does in this issue. Please don't feel that your experience has to be a totally positive, unqualified success to be published. We may well learn as much from those attempts that weren't particularly successful as we do from those that were.

Unlike Oprah's guests, you can be anonymous if you so choose. The important thing is to share what works, what doesn't work, and how we can add to our teaching through the creative use of assessment techniques.

The contact person is Jim Belz at

ext. 2313 or via E-Mail.

Results of Faculty Survey "Pre-test"

One common method of assessment is a "pre-test, post-test" instrument. In preparation for the November Faculty Development Day program, the Outcomes Assessment Committee circulated an Assessment Utilization Survey to all faculty, with the expectation that an almost identical survey will be distributed during the upcoming Spring Quarter. This "pre-test, post-test" should help the Committee assess how well it has met its goals of informing faculty about assessment and creating an environment in which assessment is embraced.

A total of 109 "pretest" surveys were returned, 83% of which were from full-time faculty. Some of the key results are as follows:

Concerning the level of knowledge about assessment, 27% of the respondents said they had little or no knowledge, 63% said they had some or moderate knowledge, and 10 % felt they were well-informed or had expert status.

When asked if they were using classroom assessment techniques, 47% said no, 37% indicated occasionally, and 16% frequently.

At the course level (i.e. looking at what is going on in a multi-section course), 30% said they had experience, but at the program level, only 7% indicated any experience.

What this survey seems to indicate is that we started the Fall Quarter with, at best, only moderate knowledge about and implementation of outcomes assessment among COD faculty. The Committee is anxious to see what changes, if any, will occur folllowing a Faculty Development Day given over to assessment and the goals that every faculty member will try at least one classroom technique and every discipline will assess a multi-section course.

1996 Assessment Conference in Indianapolis

Three members of the Outcomes Assessment Committee, Rosemary McKinney, Lesli Beltran, and Jim Belz, were among the 400+ attendees at this year's edition of the well-respected Assessment Conference in Indianapolis, sponsored by Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Held November 10 - 12, the theme of the conference was "Technology: Best New Hope for Assessment?"

In actuality, about one third of the presentations focused heavily on the application of technology to assessment, another third on issues surrounding the assessment of general education, and most of the remaining sessions dealt with assessment of specific programs such as nursing, pharmacy, and business.

Other features of the Conference included opening and closing panel discussions by four of the leading assessment gurus: Trudy Banta, Tom Angelo, Peter Ewell, and Jeff Seybert, who was the keynote speaker at our faculty development day; an Instrument Fair, featuring assessment instruments from a number of test developers and practitioners; and theme luncheon tables divided by interest groups.

All in all, it was a well-organized, well-presented conference, and the COD participants brought back a number of interesting ideas to share with the Committee and ultimately the larger COD community.

F A Q  (Frequently Asked Questions)

Q. Some people in our discipline are squabbling about what our assessment design should look like. We've got two or three rather good ideas for assessments in our multi-section classes. Do we all have to use the same design?

A. No, you don't have to use the same assessment design in multi-section classes. If your discipline has two or three good ideas, then create a "menu" from which your faculty members may choose a technique they prefer. If a few faculty members prefer one technique over another, they should try that technique while others may choose a different method. Also, realize that these designs and techniques may change over time . . some may be modified slightly, others may be changed significantly by the discipline members.

Q. What are some of the other disciplines doing for their assessment models?

A. A common model seems to be some type of pre-test/post-test design, some in an objective format, others in an essay or performance method. Some disciplines may choose more than one type of assessment method to be used during the quarter. A primary issue would be to illuminate that something academic took place, that students learned, and that the outcome of that learning is linked to the mission and vision of the colllege.

Q. Is this assessment stuff going to take a lot of classroom time?

A. It really doesn't have to take a lot of time, and it is hoped that the result will be useful in increasing the effectiveness of the learning process. One way by which some instructors have used a pre-test/post-test model is to administer a 50 or 100-item objective test on the first day or two of class. Rather than having all students answer all questions, the first row of students may be asked to answer items #1-20, row 2 of students answers items #21-40, row three answers #41-60, and so on...even to repeat certain items, e.g., row 5 may answer #1-20 again, etc. This gives the instructor a sample of the academic performance of the students as they enter the class, without taking an entire class period to respond to a long assessment device. This sample of information may be compared at the end of the quarter with results of post-test data.

Assessment In Action

A Sharing Of Ideas
Assessment of a Group Project in an Abnormal Psychology Class

Recently, Dr. Richard Voss, Assistant Professor of Psychology, devised a group project to reinforce his students' understanding following a major unit on schizophrenia. Several days before the class exercise, he handed out a packet which included a pertinent section of the DSM-IV, the standard source that psychologists and psychiatrists use to diagnose and type a wide array of mental disorders, and a detailed description of a particular individual's symptoms. On the day of the class, he broke the students into small groups and asked each group to come up with an analysis of the case, applying what they had learned from the lectures, their assigned readings, and the DSM-IV handout.

When the students had completed this exercise, Dick asked the following assessment questions: On a scale of 1 to 5 (with the higher number being the more positive response), how helpful in understanding the material was this exercise and how enjoyable was this exercise? The aggregate response was 4.0 to the first question and 3.7 to the second.

Dick's third question was, "How could this exercise be improved?" Responses included:

1. Give out the case study earlier to allow more time to think about it.

2. Do more examples in class about how to analyze a case.

3. Assign more points for this projectit took a lot of preparation.

4. The DSM handout was confusing. I couldn't understand a lot of it.

Based on these comments, Dick is planning to make the following modifications the next time he uses this exercise:

1. The details of the case study will be distributed at the beginning of the schizophrenia unit.

2. At least one additional in-class case analysis will be added as a further example.

3. The number of points for the project will stay the same, but Dick is going to redistribute them more equitably over the various components and more clearly define the criteria for full credit (a rubric).

4. The sections of the DSM that appear in the handout will be pared down and more carefully focused so that students are not overwhelmed by extraneous terms that may confuse them.

The foregoing is an excellent example of how outcomes assessment shifts the focus from the delivery of information to the learning of material. Dick saw the need for some way for students to really come to grips with the material they had been covering and devised the exercise, to which his students responded positively as evidenced by questions one and two. But he went beyond that positive response to ask question three, and the responses he got there will help him to improve the learning process even more when next he teaches this unit.

Copyright © 1998 College of DuPage
Students' Outcomes Assessment Committee  · (630)-942-2081
klassen@cdnet.cod.edu
Updated December 16, 1999
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