RE: Assessment

Liberal Arts Division Emphasizes Outcomes Assessment

This year each discipline within the Liberal Arts Division was strongly encouraged to devote the October 31 In-Service Day to discussions, activities, and programs relating to assessment. Two weeks later at the all-division meeting, the entire program was devoted to sharing each discipline's approach to assessment.

Many of the disciplines have chosen a pre-test/post-test approach, but the variations are interesting, creative, and sometimes even fun. Students in Economics will respond to a questionnaire dealing with current economic issues; Education students will be asked to identify three current trends in education and explain their importance; Geography students will be asked to fill in maps; Journalism students will be challenged to retell a fairy tale as if it were a news item; Sociology students will be asked to respond in a structured way to a video presentation of a sociological issue; and Theatre students will be asked to do a structural analysis of a one-act play in preparation for mounting a production.

Art History will use a pre-test/post-test, but students in studio art classes will be assessed on journals and portfolios of their work. As part of their assessment, Humanities students may be asked to fill a cup as a measure of how much the creative arts fill their lives. And students in music performance classes will be assessed by jury exams of both individual and ensemble performances.

It is clear that many of the disciplines within the Liberal Arts Division have done a great deal of self-examination concerning what is really important for their students to learn, and they have devised appropriate methods to assess that learning.

Library to Strengthen Assessment Collection

For FY 1997-98, the Library was given an extra $50,000 in collection development money to help update materials in rapidly changing disciplines and to build collections to support new courses and new programs.

For the past several months the librarians have been closely examining the collection needs and making specific proposals for how the special funds should be allocated. On the basis of those competitive proposals, $2,000 has been earmarked for purchasing materials related to outcomes assessment and teaching improvement. This should go a very long way to providing a solid, up-to-date core collection of materials to benefit all those involved in outcomes assessment.

Diana Fitzwater is overseeing this particular development fund, and she has already identified a number of new items for purchase, but she will be more than happy to entertain suggestions for titles from any faculty member or administrator.

Unfortunately, the Library of Congress has not designated a nice, neat subject heading for outcomes assessment, so the materials tend to be scattered under a variety of headings and in different call number areas. However, once a significant number of new titles have been purchased and processed, a bibliography will be developed and distributed to help publicize what is available.

Although faced with tropical heat, torrential downpours, the subarctic chill of the Fontainbleau Hotel air conditioning, and the lurking danger of a serial killer [Andrew Cunanan was living on a houseboat only a few blocks away], Russ Watson and Jim Belz persevered and attended the AAHE Conference on Assessment and Quality held in Miami Beach this past June.

The annual AAHE Conference is one of the premier events related to assessment. Including preconference programs, there were five very crowded days of activities. The main conference was divided into four strands: the impact of assessment on accreditation; impact on classrooms and curriculum; impact on student learning outside the classroom; and the impact of quality improvement on institutional effectiveness. Each strand had multiple presentations, and Russ and Jim were kept very busy attending those programs that seemed particularly relevant to the COD assessment endeavor and picking up the handouts for sessions they were unable to attend because of time conflicts. Some of the things learned at that conference have already found their way into this newsletter, and there may well be more to follow.

This coming June, the AAHE Conference will be held in Cincinnati. Any faculty member interested in attending should contact Russ Watson or Lesli Beltran, the Co-Chairs of the Committee. However, you do need to plan ahead carefully since the opening preconferences start as early as Wednesday of the final week of Spring Quarter

Q. Is there much available on the Internet/World Wide Web relating to assessment?

A. Using a search engine such as Alta Vista, a quick and dirty search on "outcomes assessment" pulls up thousands of sites, probably many more than you want to examine. Using a web directory like Yahoo and first limiting your search to sites related to higher education gives a more usable list.

A quick scan of either list shows that many colleges and universities have mounted their assessment plans on the internet, and these are often discipline specific, so it is fairly easy to identify assessment plans for History, English, or Political Science, etc.

The American Association for Higher Education (AAHE), which has been so heavily involved in the assessment movement, has a home page at <www.aahe.org>. Among the useful features of this site are announcements of recent and upcoming conferences, annotated bibliographies of recent publications, and full-text articles from recent issues of the AAHE Bulletin.

A very different approach is taken by HEPROC, the Higher Education Process Network <heproc.org>. HEPROC is a "well-developed, well-maintained community of thoughtful educators who serve each other as networking partners." More than 2200 members in 40 countries are involved in a dozen or more mediated e-mail discussion forums, a number of which have relevance to assessment and the improvement of teaching.

Q. Is there anything new in the Library that you'd like to recommend?

A. Funny you should ask. Take a look at Improving the Environment for Learning: Academic Leaders Talk About What Works, by Janet Donald. The call number is LB 2341 .D66 1997. In nine chapters, Dr. Donald, Professor of Education at McGill University, identifies the optimal practices for creating a high quality learning environment and the steps that faculty and administrators need to take to improve student learning. Several of the chapters bear directly on the role of assessment.

Dr. Donald's style is readable, relatively free of jargon, and she includes numerous comments from a wide range of educational leaders whom she surveyed in preparation for this book. This is a book to curl up with over a long winter weekend.

Assessment In Action: A Sharing Of Ideas
A New Twist on True-False, Multiple Choice Exams

The previous issue of this column reported on a technique called the Readiness Assurance Process, as presented by Larry K. Michaelson, Professor of Management at the University of Oklahoma, during the AAHE Conference on Assessment & Quality held in Miami Beach this past June. Described in some detail was how a true-false/multiple choice test covering assigned readings was used as a starting point for a great deal of class interaction. Some may question that such a test can generate so much activity, but the explanation lies in how the test is structured.

For the true/false section, every question requires three responses. If the student is absolutely sure the answer is true, s/he writes TTT. If the student is absolutely sure the answer is false, the response is FFF. Depending on whether the answer is right or wrong, it will earn either full credit or no credit, just as in a standard true/false exam. If, however, the student is somewhat unsure of the answer, s/he can hedge by responding TFF or TTF, ensuring a minimum of 1/3 credit or a maximum of 2/3 credit. Students like this option because it means they can always get some credit for an answer, but they soon realize that they need to minimize such choices because a whole section of hedged choices can never add up to a passing grade. The hedged answers also help the students quickly focus on the concepts they are unsure of in the reading assignments, and these are the ones that are dealt with in the team discussion and the written appeals described in the previous column.

In the multiple choice section, each question has the standard five choices, but anywhere from one to five choices may be correct. To get full credit, the student must circle every correct response, and wrong responses are subtracted from right responses, so it's possible for a student to get negative credit for a question if, for example, s/he circled one correct response but two incorrect responses. This method of constructing a multiple choice exam forces students to carefully consider every possible response, not just quickly find "the right answer" and move on to the next question. There are consequences not only for wrong answers but for also failing to identify right answers.

Constructing a true-false/multiple choice test in this fashion is perhaps a bit more challenging, especially in devising the scoring system, but it transforms the test into a true learning tool that promotes critical thinking rather than being just a quick spot-check on who has done the assigned reading. In terms of the Principles of Good Practice, it emphasizes time on task for the outside reading assignments, communicates high expectations, gives prompt feedback, and if used in conjunction with team learning, it develops reciprocity and cooperation among students and promotes active learning.

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