The 2021 Assessement Workshop may have looked a little different than it has in the past, but we call it a success! 28 faculty and 13 students formed 8 teams, all looking at some aspect of student learning in their own programs.
A huge win for the Office of Assessment as facilitators of this workshop is that 100% of our evaluation respondents “agree” or “strongly agree” that their team made progress toward improving student learning assessment in their discipline! In addition, 62% of our respondents plan to apply for Assessment Grants to continue their work!
Dr. Nicole West of the Student Affairs in Higher Education program had this to say:
…Although we are not tackling our original project idea, I am grateful we engaged in this process, which led us to discovering that we don’t have program outcomes. The work we’ve done these past few weeks has no doubt laid a solid foundation for a conversation with our faculty about how to move forward in developing program outcomes.
Thank you for creating this opportunity!
Dr. Karen Engler from Communication Sciences and Disorders said:
…another outcome I forgot to mention in the feedback form was the draft of our course project timeline with our graduate student. That was very helpful to get the student’s perspective as we move from a 2 semester project to 1 semester. And it was helpful to hear the comment by another grad student (not in our program) during our presentation:
‘Love the idea of an action research project! The earlier the better I would think too. Understanding the lingo would help students learn throughout their program.’
Every Team looked at their program’s student learning outcomes, and the majority of participants who responded to our evaluation said they plan to make a change based on what they saw. Some of those changes are outlined below:
- Gather graduate students’ perceptions and feedback and apply it to course designing
- Streamline the SLO information we have to describe the master’s level degree and not the different strands
- Our team discovered that we needed to create program outcomes
A few of the changes made to programs based on the workshop projects are that groups plan to…
- Align program learning outcomes with each courses’ objectives and state them explicitly in the syllabi as well as share with students
- Review current course goals and align with NASPA/ACPA competencies
- Modify faculty peer review forms to facilitate growth in response to peer and student feedback
- Move to a new action research project course that will emphasize direct teaching application
- Suggest different ways to conduct our graduate seminar course
Be on the lookout for our teams final workshop presentation slides to appear on our website and join us next year!
Thank you again to all of our teams who joined!