Meeting July 26th

Yesterday we looked at the structures for monitoring and nurturing assessment that were showcased in chapters of our Maki book and we discussed the aspects of the structures that might or might now work at Palo Alto College. We talked about the Program Review Committee and how it might be a good starting point for a committee to monitor and nurture assessment at PAC. One thing that we all agreed upon was that for faculty to embrace and have pride in the assessment work that we are doing, that this committee most focus on opportunities to improve and that assessment efforts must be faculty driven. We felt that faculty should serve to make a contribution to their profession. We are going to look at several other models today and do some more thinking about a structure to monitor and nurture assessment at PAC.
We also looked at assessment efforts at sister colleges and compared our efforts to theirs to appreciate the different approach.
Brian shared resources that he found about assessment -- some nice guidelines from other institutions that will help us. A final thought was that assessment should never be used for faculty evaluations.

Student Connection Session

Our sessions the last two days have been VERY productive!
Summer II faculty reviewed the products from summer I for general education assessment and program assessment and made some valuable suggestions that have been implemented on the Spring Report, Key Assignment Cover Sheet, Faculty Guidelines, Program Assessment Template.
We had a wonderful discussion today with a group of students about the Teamwork competency. Together we generated a list of suggestions that is bound to help as we re-think this competency and how it should be assessed as well as create faculty guidelines for teamwork.
Next meeting we are going to begin discussing some models for monitoring Gen Ed Assessment and Program Assessment from the Maki book.

Catching Up on the Last Two Weeks!

Since my last post, we have had 4 meetings -- July 5th, July 6th, July 13th, and July 14th.
First I want to summarize the July 5th and July 6th meetings.
These two meetings the Summer I group scrambled to look at a lot of issues related to assessment work and make some decisions. The July 5th meeting we made some concrete decisions about the format of the Curriculum Maps and really specified exactly what they would map for degrees and certificates. We also clarified our thinking about Program Assessment and the kinds of support documents needed to pull off Program Assessment during the next academic year. Finally we started thinking about General Education Competency issues and we ran out of time. The July 6th meeting we settled on a template for Program Assessment Plans/Reports. We did some thinking about the front end of Fall 2011 semester and the messages that we needed to give faculty. We especially talked about how important it will be to have positive messages. We compiled a list of positive statements about the value of the Curriculum Map initiative and a similar list of positive statements about the value of the Key Assignment initiative. We looked at a draft calendar for merging all the assessment efforts -- Program Assessment, Gen Ed Assessment, Program Review, Unit Planning, Curriculum Maps, Key Assignments, High Risk Course Action Plans -- and we talked about how the different assessments supported each other. Finally, I gave my 'Reading Assignment' report on the Lumina Foundation's Degree Qualification Profile. The outcomes for Associate Degree students might be helpful for us to review as we revise our Gen Ed Rubrics. A BIG Thank You! to the Summer I group!

The next two meetings were workshops by Dr. Judith Boettcher. July 13th she provided us with a framework and best principles and practices for online and blended learning. This workshop featured three PAC faculty sharing thier experiences as they worked with Dr. Boettcher to revise their online courses. July 14th Dr. Boettcher focused on building community in courses and the use of teamwork as one of the community building strategies to deepen the learning experience. This workshop will help natural science, English, Government, and Speech faculty design their online courses to address Teamwork! The most wonderful thing about Dr. Boettcher's workshops was the way she synthesized all the information she knew about helping students learn and then continuously got feedback from us to see what we understood. She customized the content to our ZPD! It was fun to watch her in action and I learned a lot! It was nice to see her affirm in her workshop all the national experts we have brought to PAC recently to help the faculty: Linda Suskie, Barbara Millis (Dee Fink), Ginny Anderson, and Elizabeth Barkley.

June 21, 2011 Meeting

We spent most of this meeting helping each other figure out how to access resources to complete the Summer 2011 Update on Program Assessment form and actually working on our forms. Thanks to Sharon, we have some great models to look at in our Sharepoint!

Dr. Elizabeth Barkley Workshops

For me, yesterday's workshops led by Dr. Elizabeth Barkley were very thought provoking. As we lead faculty to create engaging assignments that can be assessed for our Intstitutional General Education Competencies and our Program Learning Outcomes, it will be good to keep the principles in mind that she shared. It would also be good to check out her two books for assignment inspiration ideas.

I am noticing that when consultants come, and the audience is multi-discipline faculty, that the "content" of their presentations is going to be best principles for effective teaching and the method is going to be (hopefully) putting those principles into practice using engagement/active learning/collaborative learning techniques (that's what Barbara Millis did for her two presentations during Employee Development Day).

I did come away with some new knowledge:
motivation = value x expectancy
student engagement = motivation x active learning
I had never had the language of positive transfer and negative transfer, but certainly in math, we see this all the time and it is very helpful to be aware of it as you teach so you can alert the students.
I never thought about the fact that we store ideas in memory by similarity and we retrieve them by differences -- I can see how sharing this with math students will be very helpful.

I thought the way she used the MATCH acronym with the quote at the end was a very clever, brain-based learning technique.

I was very impressed with her power points -- minimal words, images, and she used animation appropriately.

She did use a lot of STEM examples (the Title V STEM Grant paid for her to come) as I asked.

It will be interesting to see the compiled ideas from the two workshops on the worksheet. I think the repeated group activity of filling out the worksheet automatically limited the number of SETs that were introduced during the workshop.

At least many people will be aware of her books and hopefully will check out SETs and CoLTs.

Meeting Summary June 8th

Carmen Velasquez and some students visited our meeting! We showed the students some of the resources on the web for our General Education assessment efforts this past year. We discussed how to better get this information to students. One idea would be to get the information in a more accessible place on our college web site. Another idea was to connect the six competencies to student efforts in student clubs and activities. We explained some of the details of the assessment process and gave the students the findings files from Spring 11 to give them an idea of the data that we collect. One finding from Spring 11 was that many of the students (47%) in our sample had dropped their courses -- this was unexpected because the students in the sample had taken 45 or more credit hours. Students offered that sometimes students close to graduation are very "GPA conscious" and they might drop classes to preserve a high GPA. It came out in the meeting that these students were not all aware of the 3 peat rule, 120 hour rule, 6 drop rule, and limits on financial aid. We discussed some ways to get this information to students - an idea that was suggested was to make sure these are covered in SDEV. Carmen invited the group to participate in the Student Engagement and Retention Retreat on June 29th.
After the students left, we continued to think about ways to help students focus on learning and not be so "GPA conscious". We talked about the idea that we learn best when we make mistakes -- that C's and B's are OK. It was pointed out that the scholarship application at PAC might be motivating students to drop courses when they are not getting A's -- there is a heavy advantage to having a 4.0 in the rating scale.
We compared the PAC approach to assessing General Education Competencies to the approach taken at some of our sister colleges. We are using a Backwards Design approach that is focused on collegiality and improvement.
We continued to look at drafts this meeting. Anna submitted some edits to the policy and I will update our file in the wiki. When I presented the "Faculty Acknowledgment Form" we had a discussion on its optional use that expanded to a discussion on how to help faculty with the deadlines -- some departments have sharepoint areas where files could be placed to help faculty. We are still thinking about this...
Another draft that we looked at was the worksheet to get faculty ideas for related action plans -- this is just an edit of the one we used last Spring at Faculty Development Day.
Finally, Patrick, Bailey, and I shared what we got out of the reading assignments. Patrick's reading was kind of depressing -- faculty laboring to assess writing skills with little to no support. Bailey shared insights from the reading on data access, and the value of leadership communications concerning assessment. I shared how the focus on learning is supported by assessment -- good stuff in Chapter 1 of Huba and Freed.

Experiencing a Paradigm Shift through Assessment

Here are my major take-aways from reading chapter 1 in Huba and Freed’s Learner-Centered Assessment on College Campuses:

• This quote that they include sums up the paradigm shift for me ---“The ultimate criterion of good teaching is effective learning” (Cross, 1993, p 20)
• Students learn when they are engaged, they reflect on what they are learning, they make connections among concepts, and they care about what they are learning.
• I am familiar with Barr and Tagg’s From Teaching to Learning 1995 article in Change Magazine. Huba and Freed take this paradigm shift and shine assessment spot lights on it on page 5 – In the Learner-Centered Paradigm:
o “Teaching and Assessment are intertwined”;
o “Assessment is used to promote and diagnose learning”,
o “Emphasis is on generating better questions and learning from errors”,
o “Desired learning is assessed directly through papers, projects, performances, portfolios, and the like.”
• Huba and Freed advocate a systems approach to promote learner-centered teaching – efforts to change at the course level are connected to change at the program and institutional level. How does our system foster student learning? One area for improvement that Foundations of Excellence surveys uncovered was connecting co-curricular experiences to what is going on in our classrooms – we want to capitalize on all experiences for students across our system to maximize their learning.
• I love this observation on page 12, “As Howard Gardner (1991) points out, the ability to take objectively scored tests successfully is a useless skill as soon as one graduates from college. The rest of one’s life, he says, is a series of projects.”
Huba and Freed go into great detail in this chapter on the stages of the assessment cycle and how to best accomplish each stage. They also trace the history of the assessment movement in higher education up to the publishing date of this book, 2000. The final section of this chapter focuses on the “Continuous Improvement Movement” and “Improvement as Accountability”. We at PAC are experiencing this first-hand with our SACS Compliance requirements this year. In this final section of the chapter, Huba and Freed go into detail about how Learner-Centered Assessment supports attributes of a quality undergraduate education:
• Learner-Centered Assessment Promotes High Expectations
• Learner-Centered Assessment Respects Diverse Talents and Learning Styles
• Learner-Centered Assessment Enhances the Early Years of Study
• Learner-Centered Assessment Promotes Coherence in Learning
• Learner-Centered Assessment Synthesizes Experiences, Fosters Ongoing Practice of Learned Skills, and Integrates Education and Experience
• Learner-Centered Assessment Actively Involves Students in Learning and Promotes Adequate Time on Task
• Learner-Centered Assessment Provides Prompt Feedback
• Learner-Centered Assessment Fosters Collaboration
• Learner-Centered Assessment Depends on Increased Student-Faculty Feedback
I recommend that everyone at PAC read chapter one of Huba and Freed’s Learner-Centered Assessment on College Campuses!