5 Steps to Renew Program-Level Learning Outcomes Assessment

You regularly assess student learning outcomes at your institution, but when was the last time you assessed your assessments? If the answer is, “I can’t remember,” or “I don’t know,” then it’s probably time to take a step back and review your school’s overall assessment process and strategies.

When accrediting agencies come knocking, they are particularly interested in one thing: your student learning outcomes. Have you been keeping up with the latest trends in learning outcomes assessment?

If not, your institution may have a hard time demonstrating success to external reviewers. Even internal program reviews rely upon the collection of meaningful assessment data to justify curricular changes and allocate funding.

On top of the growing calls for accountability coming from accreditors is the “new normal” caused by the recent economic downturn. In this tightened climate, faculty members need to increase collaboration to substantiate their pedagogical effectiveness.

Now is the perfect time to conduct a thorough audit to ensure that your existing program for assessing student learning outcomes measures up.

In 5 Steps to Renew Program-Level Learning Outcomes Assessment, Dr. Lisa Shibley of Millersville University helps colleges and universities fine-tune their existing assessment programs and provide detailed guidance for making necessary improvements.

Order this seminar

This online video seminar explains:

• Renewal and revision of learning outcomes
• The Learning Opportunities Matrix
• How to reflect on assessment practices using a rubric
• Enhancing student learning assessment within your program or department
• Connecting program outcomes to mission and general education objectives
• Analysis of collected outcome information
• Strategizing assessment of particular course objectives
• The role of curricular maps
• Integrated assessment strategies
• How to find where learning opportunities occur in your program

Order this seminar

Who will benefit?
The time to renew your student assessment program is now. Make the commitment to improve student learning at your campus. This video seminar is particularly important for those who are preparing for a program review or external accreditation, including:

• Faculty and instructors
• Department chairs
• Teams of faculty involved in assessment within their department
• School deans
• Assessment coordinators
• Institutional research staff
• Administrators

Order this seminar

While many faculty have expertise in exploring research questions, few think of their classroom as an opportunity for study. Classroom inquiry involves having a faculty member explore and evaluate a range of information concerning teaching—measuring the effectiveness of a specific classroom technique or a certain type of assessment, or addressing broader questions related to course structure and emphasis—and assess its impact on student learning. In doing so, faculty move beyond anecdotal or informal measures of inquiry to structured examinations of teaching and of student learning that then cycle back into their teaching and future offerings of a course.

In the past 10 years, we’ve helped more than 200 faculty engage in guided classroom inquiry through a faculty development program. Our experiences suggest that classroom inquiry can promote individual faculty development as well as sponsor institutional innovation and assessment.

Classroom inquiry process
“I’m a biologist, or sociologist, or (fill in the appropriate discipline), not an educational researcher” is a common refrain for faculty when asked why they haven’t formally explored their teaching. But as faculty are introduced to the idea, they begin to see that classroom inquiry is not new—it mirrors the approach one typically applies to disciplinary-based scholarly research. Each requires that an inquiry have clear goals and objectives, that there be adequate preparation, that appropriate methods be employed, that meaningful results be determined, and that there be clear communication. The significant difference with classroom inquiry is that the subject faculty are studying is more personal, because they are examining themselves as teachers and the impact of their decisions and actions on their students’ learning.

Once faculty see the similarities, they often begin to approach challenging questions concerning their teaching with the same critical intellectual energy that they use when conducting their disciplinary research. For junior faculty, such inquiry offers a structured means to develop as a teacher, helping them to decide what does and does not work in their classrooms. For more senior faculty, classroom inquiry often reenergizes their teaching by helping them answer those persistent questions they have about student learning.

In our faculty development work, we emphasize five major steps to carrying out an effective classroom inquiry: formulating an inquiry question, developing an assessment strategy, teaching the course and collecting data, analyzing the data and evaluating its results, and cycling back the conclusions and recommendations into one’s teaching. Faculty use the results of their classroom inquiry in a variety of ways. Some have redesigned components of their courses or developed new ones. Others have used their inquiries as supporting documentation for annual merit review evaluations, teaching award applications, and promotion and tenure packets. From a department perspective, classroom inquiry can be useful for assessing learning outcomes for a program or accreditation review. For example, an English Department revised its major based on the recommendations of two faculty who investigated student learning in the introductory and capstone major courses. Similarly, a Construction Management Department used five classroom inquiry projects to document program outcomes for an accreditation visit.

How to support classroom inquiry
A key component of successful inquiry is faculty ownership. Classroom inquiry is not something that should be mandated, but rather should be nurtured and recognized. Inquiry is most powerful when faculty are supported in defining their own purposes for undertaking it. Administrators can support classroom inquiry by

• developing opportunities for faculty to talk about their teaching,
• integrating it into department/academic reward systems,
• encouraging the use of data/results for documenting the department’s teaching impact,
• providing resources for faculty to form an inquiry group to support one another’s efforts, and
• encouraging faculty to share their inquiry via journal articles, presentations, and posters outside their office door.

Linkage to SOTL
We often are asked how classroom inquiry connects to the larger Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) movement. While faculty inquiry is the foundation for both, SoTL emphasizes a deeper engagement with the literature, and broader emphasis on exploring an issue that will offer insight to faculty at other schools. We have found that while some faculty find SoTL work central to their professional lives, many are content to use classroom inquiry as a basis for being more reflective and structured in their personal growth as teachers and to impact the teaching atmosphere at their school.

Finally, no two classroom inquiry projects are the same. Each is specific to the teacher, the course being taught, the students taking the course, and the inquiry question being explored.

In our experience, faculty who engage in classroom inquiry often find the same joy of inquiry in their teaching that they already experience in other areas of their intellectual life.

This article, which first appeared in the March 2009 issue of Academic Leader, was excerpted from: P. Savory, A. Burnett, and A. Goodburn, Inquiry into the College Classroom: A Journey Toward Scholarly Teaching, Jossey-Bass, 2007.

This is very unfortunate for a number of reasons. First, the most proficient practitioners of learning outcome assessment are the faculty themselves. Second, faculty members are the designers and developers of curricula, courses, and the core of higher education itself. Third, faculty members are the ones who will innovate and develop new methods of teaching and learning, and will implement any changes based on assessment results developed through the program’s assessment methods.

It’s fashionable lately to try to motivate faculty through statements like “If we don’t do assessment ourselves, someone else will do it for us.” This gets attention at times, but it misses the whole point; we do assessment already, because it is useful to us. If we do it better, it will be more useful and valuable.

Step one is to recognize what is already happening, build a structure for it, and make that structure transparent. Step two is to build on the work that already is being done and focus it into the areas of most importance to the faculty in assuring that their students know, value, and do what the faculty intend. Getting faculty and departments to realize this, and act on it, is of utmost importance. Assessment structures can be imposed, mandates can be made, and penalties for noncompliance assessed from outside the program, but this is a dead end. If program assessment is ever to be taken seriously and used effectively, it must be systematic and built into the very structure of the program or department by the faculty themselves.

How does a department chair motivate faculty to participate in the construction of a systematic and transparent program assessment structure? First, by making the point that assessments already are being conducted, but in a way that is not as useful as it could be. Second, by showing that a systematic approach to program assessment has value to the department, and not just because it helps the students, but because it helps faculty have more valuable, meaningful, and successful teaching experiences.

This second step requires departmental leadership—sustainable leadership—and the role of the chair is the largest obstacle to the endurance of useful program assessment. In many universities, the chair’s position is short lived. A motivated chair must build institutional structures within the department that will outlive her or him. These involve the following:

• A clear message on the purpose of assessment
• Making assessment methods simple and useful
• Making assessment collaborative, collegial, and cooperative
• Having an incentive structure that rewards useful assessments and the scholarship of teaching and learning
• Making connections with alumni
• Making connections with the community

Thinking seriously about what students should know, value, and do allows faculty members the opportunity to think about their own practices, their own work. This not only can lead to a renewed interest in their own department and its curriculum, but can help them refocus their own attention on things that really matter to them in their research and their service. Most important of all, it can reignite the passion for teaching in many by treating research on teaching and learning as valuable and meaningful for the department’s health.

Gary A. Gigliotti is associate vice president of academic affairs for teaching and assessment and director of the Center for Teaching and Advancement and Assessment Research at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

Excerpted from The Faculty and Program-Wide Learning Outcome Assessment, February 2009, Academic Leader.