Educational Assessment: Designing a System for More Meaningful Results

Assessing institutional effectiveness is a noble pursuit, but measuring student learning is not always easy. As with so many things we try to quantify, there’s much more to learning than a number in a datasheet.

When it comes to assessment. Sometimes there are more questions than answers, even after you get the results.

How do you define success?
How do you know what your students are learning?
Are you happy with your assessment results?
Will you use the results to bring changes to learning goals, curriculum, teaching methods, and perhaps the assessments themselves?

Using Assessment Data to Inform and Reform
Assessing student learning outcomes can help institutions understand what students are learning, and where there might be gaps. However, as Trudy Banta notes in her article An Accountability Program Primer for Administrators, “just as simply weighing a pig will not make it fatter, spending millions simply to test college students is not likely to help them learn more.” (p. 6)

Educational Assessment: Designing a System for More Meaningful Results

Download your copy of this report today! It's FREE to Faculty Focus members.

Sign In Create an Account

This special report Educational Assessment: Designing a System for More Meaningful Results features articles from Academic Leader, and looks at the assessment issue from a variety of different angles to help you a strong assessment program.

• Counting Something Leads to Change in an Office or in a Classroom
• An Accountability Program Primer for Administrators
• An Effective Approach to Generating Questions for Guiding Program Assessment and Reform
• The Dash to Dashboards
• Collaborating on Rubric Development: A Work in Progress
• Surviving Your Regional Accreditation: A Tongue-in-Cheek Reflection
• The Faculty and Program-Wide Learning Outcome Assessment
• Assessing the Degree of Learner-Centeredness in a Department or Unit
• Keys to Effective Program-Level Assessment

Whether you’re looking to completely change your approach to assessment, or simply improve the efficacy of your current assessment processes, we hope this report will help guide your discussions and eventual decisions.

Join the Faculty Focus community for full access to all our special reports!

Faculty Focus contains a wealth of valuable material on all of the key issues that matter to today’s top faculty and administrators. It’s packed with strategies, tips, and other information you can use on the topics that impact your students, your school, and your work, including:

• Student Engagement
• Instructional Design
• Online Education
• Classroom Management
• Educational Assessment
• Teaching with Technology
• Faculty Development
• Curriculum Development
• Trends in Higher Education
• And much, much more.

Educational Assessment: Designing a System for More Meaningful Results

Download your copy of this report today! It's FREE to Faculty Focus members.

Sign In Create an Account

How Good Is Good Enough? Setting Benchmarks or Standards

100 is a good score. Or is it? A score of 100 doesn’t really mean anything on its own. Was the total possible score 100? Or was the score 100 out of 150? Did you score 95 on the same test last year? Or was it 120? Do you even know?

As important as assessment scores are, they tell you very little without some context. And if you are going to spend a lot of time and money on assessments (and let’s face it: all colleges and universities spend a lot of time and money on assessments), you must be sure that you can make sense of your results. Otherwise you have no way of knowing whether you excel or struggle and in which areas. You have no way to chart improvement or illustrate accountability.

There are relatively simple and accessible ways to establish criteria that will enable you to analyze and interpret assessment data. Discover them in the online seminar, How Good is Good Enough? Setting Benchmarks or Standards. During this seminar Linda Suskie provides the information you need to decode your assessment data and unlock its potential to improve student learning on your campus.

Presenter Linda Suskie is a passionate national higher education assessment expert and a vice president of the college and university accreditor Middle States Commission on Higher Education. She is also the author of Assessment of Student Learning: A Common Sense Guide.

Order the CD + Transcript

In 90 information-dense minutes, this seminar will prepare you to:

• Understand and distinguish several different kinds of standards and benchmarks, including local standards, peer benchmarks, and value-added benchmarks;
• Explain the pros and cons of various kinds of standards;
• Develop processes to set standards for individual student performance and targets for collective student performance;
• Determine which standards are appropriate (and which aren’t) for your campus and circumstances;
• Involve colleagues in setting standards;
• Use rubrics to articulate local standards;
• Vary targets when necessary and incorporate samples of student work into discussions on standards; and
• Shift your perspective to view standard setting as an iterative process.

Suskie also explores the value of using more than one kind of standard to gain a more complete, balanced picture of student learning, and she explains the value of expressing targets in percentages, not averages. Ultimately you will come away with strategies and insights that will allow you to understand assessment results and use them to improve student learning and demonstrate accountability.

When you order the recording of this seminar on CD, you’ll also receive a PDF of the transcript, all for the same price as attending the seminar live.

An optional Campus Access License is available for an additional $200. It allows the purchasing institution to upload the CD of the seminar onto the institution’s password-protected internal web site for unlimited access by members of the campus community.

Who will benefit:

• Department chairs
• Assessment coordinators/directors
• Assessment committee members
• Chief executive officers
• Chief academic officers
• Deans
• Assistant/associate provosts or vice presidents for academic affairs
• Institutional research directors
• Student development staff
• Academic administrators
• Faculty governance leaders

Everything is relative, including your assessment results. Find out what they can convey about the current strengths and potential for improvement at your college or university. Order your copy of this informative seminar.

Order the CD + Transcript

All seminars include a discussion guide for facilitators
Participating in a Magna Online Seminar as a team can help leverage unique insights, foster collaboration, and build momentum for change. Each seminar now includes a Discussion Guide for Facilitators which provides step-by-step instructions for generating productive discussions and thoughtful reflection. You’ll also get guidelines for continuing the conversation after the event, implementing the strategies discussed, and creating a feedback loop for sharing best practices and challenges.

One of the changes we have seen in academia in the last 30 years or so is the shift from lecture-based classes to courses that encourage a student-centered approach. Few instructors would quibble with the notion that promoting active participation helps students to think critically and to argue more effectively. However, even the most savvy instructors are still confounded about how to best evaluate participation, particularly when it is graded along with more traditional assessment measures, such as essays, exams, and oral presentations. Type the words “class participation” and “assessment” into www.google.com, and you will get close to 700,000 hits.

Providing students with a clear, fair, and useful assessment of their class participation is challenging for even the most seasoned educator. Even when I provide a rubric that distinguishes every category of participation from outstanding to poor, students are often still confused about precisely what it is that I expect from them. It is not unusual, for example, for students to believe that attendance and participation are synonymous. On the other hand, when we attempt to spell out too precisely what it is we expect in the way of contributions, we run the risk of closing down participation. In one online site that offers assessment guidelines, for example, the course instructor characterizes “unsatisfactory” participation as follows: “Contributions in class reflect inadequate preparation. Ideas offered are seldom substantive, provide few if any insights and never a constructive direction for the class. Integrative comments and effective challenges are absent. If this person were not a member of the class, valuable airtime would be saved.” The language used in the description—”inadequate,” “seldom,” “few,” “never,” and “absent”—hardly encourages positive results. The final sentence is both dismissive and insensitive. Shy students are unlikely to risk airing an opinion in a classroom climate that is negatively charged. Certainly, the same point can be made by simply informing students, in writing, that infrequent contributions to class discussions will be deemed unsatisfactory and merit a “D” for the participation grade.

While there are a number of constructive guidelines online for generating and assessing participation, the dichotomy between the students’ perception of their contributions and the instructor’s assessment of participation is still often a problem. One tool that I have found particularly effective is to administer a brief questionnaire early in the semester (as soon as I have learned everyone’s name), which asks students to assess their own participation to date. Specifically, I ask that students do the following: “Please check the statement below that best corresponds to your honest assessment of your contribution to class discussion thus far:

_____ I contribute several times during every class discussion. (A)

_____ I contribute at least once during virtually every class discussion. (B)

_____ I often contribute to class discussion. (C)

_____ I occasionally contribute to class discussion. (D)

_____ I rarely contribute to class discussion. (E)”

I then provide a space on the form for the student to write a brief rationale for their grade, along with the option to write additional comments if they so choose. Finally, I include a section on the form for instructor response. I collect the forms, read them, offer a brief response, and return them at the next class meeting.

This informal self-assessment exercise does not take long, and it always provides intriguing results. More often than not, students will award themselves a higher participation grade than I would have. Their rationale often yields insight into why there is a disconnect between my perception and theirs. For example, a student may write, “I feel that I have earned a ‘B’ so far in class participation. I know that I’m quiet, but I haven’t missed a class and I always do my reading.” Using the “Instructor Response” space, I now have an opportunity to disabuse the student’s notion that preparation, attendance, and participation are one and the same. I also offer concrete measures that the student can take to improve his or her participation.

When this exercise is done early in the semester, it can enhance both the amount and quality of participation. It helps to build confidence and reminds students that they have to hold themselves accountable for every part of their course grade, including participation.