Final Meetings Summer 10

Lights! Camera! Action! Fall 10 semester will give us a good idea of whether or not our Gen Ed Assessment plans are "Meaningful, Manageable, and Sustainable".

The last two summer meetings of our team were spent firming up the teamwork and social responsibility rubrics and polishing the power point presentation to the faculty for the Faculty Development Day morning session August 17th.

Everyone checked to make sure that he/she had access to the Assessment Share Point drive. We decided to use the Monday afternoon department meetings to show the Program Assessment Files on the Share Point Drive and explain the "closing the loop" activities that need to be done to complete them by Sept. 3rd. The department breakouts during Tuesday morning's Faculty Development Day will be focused on Gen Ed assessment. Faculty will share ideas for embedded assessments and hopefully we will get a list of volunteers who will serve as assessors and volunteers who will send training assignments.

Keeping the Momentum Going

This is on behalf of Eleanor.
SUMMARY – E.B. Skelley
CHAPTER 19 – “KEEPING THE MOMENTUM GOING”
Assessing Student Learning – a common sense guide-2nd Edition
Linda Suskie

In this chapter, the author states that assessment should be an ongoing process which is an integral part of the working of any educational institution.
Suskie indicates that making assessment a valued component of the culture of the institution is essential to achieving this goal. She provides general and specific strategies for integrating assessment into the culture of the institution. These include:
Make Assessment Part of Everyday Processes – Program Reviews, Curriculum Approval, and Performance Evaluations.
Monitor Assessment Activities- Reporting should be clear, facile, and meaningful.
Provide Feedback – From Faculty-led Committee, Use a Rubric, and Make it Available to Program Assessment Coordinator/Committee.
Periodically Sit Back and Reflect- Review the process in order to make adjustments and continue improvement.

August 5th Meeting Summary

A small but mighty group of chairs met today and we accomplished a lot!
We discussed the Teamwork Rubric and started to edit it -- a sub-group will bring a revised rubric to our meeting next Tuesday.
We discussed some positive messages for the faculty for the large group presentation. Next Tuesday we will work on this as well.
We reviewed the Chair handout for the Workshop portion of the Faculty Develoment Meeting and edited it.
Finally, we looked at the Sharepoint Assessment site. Next time everyone will go out to the site, edit a document, and upload the edited document.
We are getting there!

Meeting Summary August 3rd

Today we ironed out the logistics for presenting the Gen Ed Assessment and Closing the Loop on Spring 10 Program Assessment activities for Monday and Tuesday of Convocation Week.
Here is what we decided -
Monday the chairs will give the faculty a heads up on the Program Assessment Closing the Loop work that will be due Sept. 3rd.
Tuesday the chairs will co-present the Gen Ed Assessment plan. After the large group session, the chairs will meet with their departments to produce brainstormed ideas for assignments that could be used to assess Communication Skills, Teamwork (for those departments that have Teamwork) and Social Responsibility (for those departments that have this competency). Chairs will also help faculty understand how to craft Related Action Plans for the Spring 10 Program Assessments.
At the Tuesday luncheon, the chairs will share the assignment ideas that the facuty generated for the competencies and debrief the morning session.

Today we also reviewed the Fall calendar and Dr. Guzman offered to let us use the Oct. Deans/Chairs/Directors time to craft the assessment plan for Spring 11 for the remaining 3 Gen Ed Competencies.

We are getting it done!

Meeting Summary July 29th

Using Faculty Convocation Day as a focus, we got a lot accomplished at this meeting! We decided that it would be more efficient to assign faculty leads ahead of time for the 'Closing the Loop' activities related to the Program Assessments done Spring 10. These leads can be notified Monday of Convocation Week during department meetings. I will create a draft rubric to guide the analysis of findings and the analysis of assessment efforts. Additionally we decided that "opportunity to learn" for the three gen ed competencies we will tackle Fall 10 can best be accomplished by sharing the rubrics with the faculty and coding the outcomes on departmental syllabi. Next we determined a timeline for accomplishing our assessment Fall 10. We are a little concerned about training faculty assessors Sept. 29th and then the actual assessing not happening until mid-November. We will attach the training file assessment results to the training artifacts to help the faculty assessors remember. A sub-group will continue to work on the Teamwork Rubric. Full steam ahead!