CTLA

Process

Assessment Process

Discipline Assessment Process

With the support of the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Assessment, the Student Learning Outcomes Assessment Committee instituted a new assessment project schedule which began Fall 2019. The new schedule involves a five-semester assessment process in which assessment planning and reporting are submitted annually. 

Following this process, an assessment report and planning document is submitted to SLOAC by a representative of each academic discipline on or before the fourth Thursday of October each year. These documents summarize assessment activities completed during the prior academic year and describe the assessment plan for the next academic year.
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Each year, academic disciplines must assess at least one of the CGCC General Education Student Learning Outcomes. Effective Fall 2020, this assessment must include at least one course competency for each course assessed. Over the course of five years, each academic discipline should assess General Education Student Learning Outcomes in ALL of their courses. Disciplines may assess multiple learning outcomes in a single year.

The schedule for the assessment project plans will be mapped on a template to be shared with the discipline assessment team. Check out GEAR to find your discipline’s assessment project map or get the link to request a map template for your discipline. Want to see an example? Check out this sample assessment project map.

Student Learning Outcome Assessment

In accordance with our institutional commitment to improve the student learning experience, course assessments embedded within the Canvas learning management system serve as a direct measure of student work. However, to address student performance in a holistic manner, academic disciplines are encouraged to incorporate indirect measures  of achievement in addition to mandatory course-embedded assessments.

The mechanism for assessing student learning outcomes is the assessment project.

What Is An Assessment Project?

An assessment project is a collection of direct and indirect measurements of student learning and development. This collection is purposefully designed and executed to capture a comprehensive picture of student performance and growth in relation to general education student learning outcomes and course competencies.    

The assessment project seeks to answer the question, what do we want to know about student learning?

Assessment projects should be meaningful, manageable, and demonstrable:

​Meaningful

  • Your project should be useful to you. It should enable you to improve student learning in your discipline by specifying one or more areas where such learning is not currently occurring as desired.
  • The findings from your project should enable you to pinpoint whether to make curricular changes, pedagogical changes, or both to improve student learning. While there are circumstances in which an assessment project leads to the conclusion that no changes need to be made, or that the assessment project itself needs to be retooled, a project driven by a strong sense that learning is weak in an area (often supported by informal observations over time) will generally conclude with valuable ideas about how to modify teaching to improve learning. A no change condition is very rare.

Manageable

  • While it may add somewhat to your discipline workload, the project should not be too extensive to properly execute.

Demonstrable

  • You should be able to determine clearly whether students have learned the knowledge and/or practices described by your learning outcomes. There should be no ambiguity about the extent to which students learned what you intended, nor about what to do next to improve student learning.

Adapted from Colorado College Picking a Good Assessment Project

The basic steps in this process include:

  • Reporting and reflection on the use of the results of previous assessment(s).
  • Identification of at least one student learning outcome and one course competency as the focus of assessment.
  • Description of methodology used to determine student success in meeting the chosen student learning outcome(s). 
  • Reporting of results of the assessment.
  • Description of data analysis and interpretation.
  • Identification of actions the discipline will take based on the assessment results.

If you would like a consultation on assessment project planning or reporting, please contact the CTLA.

Best Practices For Assessment Plans, Projects, And Reporting

Selecting a methodology for assessment starts with asking a key question:
What do you want to know about learning?

Discipline Assessment Teams

It is recommended that each discipline form an assessment team of key stakeholders for designing assessment projects, interpreting and reporting assessment results, and making changes to courses and curriculum. There is no limit to the number of participants. Each discipline is free to choose the composition of their assessment team according to the conditions unique to each discipline.

Selecting Student Learning Outcomes And Course Competencies

To facilitate analysis, it is recommended the discipline focuses on a single General Education Student Learning Outcome (GenEd SLO), and one course competency for each course to assess. Any combination of indicators within the selected GenEd SLO may be used to assess the outcome. For example, Chemistry may choose to assess GenEd SLO 1, Critical Thinking indicators 1 – 4 in all CHM courses, but will select one course competency each for CHM130, CHM151, and CHM152.

Avoid assessing all of your learning outcomes at once. Assessment projects that focus more specifically on one or two outcomes generally provide better, more actionable results.

Writing An Assessment Project Plan

Visit the General Education Assessment Resource (GEAR) page to find your assessment project detail or request a template.

Assessment Project Guiding Questions

In preparation for developing and submitting an assessment project plan, Discipline Assessment Teams should be prepared to address the following questions and considerations.

  1. What does your discipline want to know about student learning in this assessment cycle?
    • Is there a growth area that has been observed over time?
    • Are there concepts, processes, or practices with which students tend to struggle?
  2. Which course or courses are included in the assessment project?
    • Is there a logical sequence of courses in which a competency is developed?
  3. Which GenEd SLO will be assessed? Which Indicators within the SLO?
  4. Which course competencies will be assessed?
  5. What direct and indirect measures will be used to assess whether students are gaining the desired knowledge and practices prescribed by the learning outcomes?
    • Does the discipline have (or will develop) a signature assignment, capstone experience, or other common assessment instrument?
    • Can a signature assignment be devised to measure similar competencies at varying levels across courses?
  6. How have you planned to include multiple modalities, ie. online, hybrid?
  7. How will you include and inform other faculty teaching these courses, including adjuncts and Dual Enrollment instructors, about the process and the results?
  8. How will assessing the selected competencies help to answer the question, what you want to know about student learning from this project?

Collecting Evidence

It is best if assessment projects are clearly tied to discipline goals, past assessment projects, and plans for the future.

Direct assessment data is to be collected using the Outcomes Feature of Canvas. At least one direct measure for the selected GenEd SLO and course competency is required. However, the use of multiple data sources generally give the best evidence of student achievement. Student learning gains in a discipline may be best measured using a pre-post design, in which a similar assessment project is conducted in a course students take at the beginning of the discipline sequence and in a course students take at the end of a discipline sequence.

Signature Assignments

Signature assignments are not “shared” or “common assignments.” Rather, a signature assignment is a task, activity, project or exam that has been purposefully created to elicit specific learning outcomes and to collect direct evidence of student learning across different courses or sections and across time. Signature assignments are templates that faculty contextualize to fit their particular course content.

A signature assignment

  • is well-aligned with the learning outcome(s),
  • is authentic in terms of process and content,
  • may address a ‘real-world’ application, and
  • may include reflection on learning (Driscoll, 2011).

The use of signature assignments is recommended because they:

  • engage students in their learning,
  • enable programs, including general education, to collect common data across course sections for program assessment and review,
  • establish that learning outcomes are being met, in general education and/or capstone level courses,
  • foster curricular alignment, and
  • develop student’ self-reflection (metacognitive) abilities.

Signature assignments make aggregation of results across sections possible.

If you would like assistance with creating a signature assignment, the CTLA is here to assist you.

Using Rubrics

A rubric is simply a scoring tool that identifies the various criteria relevant to an assignment or learning outcome, and then explicitly states the possible levels of achievement along a continuum.

Benefits of Rubrics
  • They help students understand your expectations.
  • They can inspire better student performance. Students will be clear about what you value and how you will evaluate them.
  • They make scoring easier and faster, leaving you more time and energy to add any specific comments that go beyond the rubric scaling.
  • They make scoring more accurate, unbiased, and consistent. Every assignment is evaluated using the same criteria.
  • Marked-up rubrics returned with assignments (where relevant) help students understand their strengths and weaknesses.
  • Rubrics facilitate your ability to see patterns in where students are succeeding or falling short in terms of course (or program) skills and knowledge.
  • Rubrics reduce student arguments and complaints about grades by making scoring criteria explicit, allowing you to focus conversations with students on how they can improve their performance rather on defending your grading practices.
  • Rubrics can facilitate timely feedback by reducing the overall time spent grading while providing no less meaningful feedback than you do now.
  • In some cases, students who won’t read comments carefully may be more amenable to the detailed feedback of a rubric.
  • Rubrics can level the playing field for students who come from backgrounds that prepared them less effectively for college. Rubrics can clarify expectations without constraining an instructor to be so specific that an assignment no longer calls for higher-order thinking.
  • Rubrics facilitate discipline conversation regarding cross-course consistency.
  • Rubrics may be able to help you refine your teaching skills.

Susan M. Brookhart, How to Create and Use Rubrics for Formative Assessment and Grading; Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2013.

Visit the Teaching Commons of DePaul University for more great information on developing and using rubrics.

Recommendations Based on Assessment Results

Recommendations should be realistic, clear, and directly tied to the results of the assessment project.

It is best to include a timeline for implementing recommendations in the assessment report to ensure everyone in the discipline is on the same page. This makes the recommendations more actionable for the discipline and therefore increases the likelihood they will be implemented.

It is important to discuss any barriers to implementing recommendations. While the existence of barriers should not dissuade a discipline from making the recommendation(s), reporting on barriers is important context for interpreting recommendations and setting realistic timelines for implementing them.

Writing the Report

Visit the General Education Assessment Resource (GEAR) page to find your assessment project detail or request a template.

Be sure to address all portions of the assessment report template. It is very rare that a portion of this template will not be applicable to your project and each section provides the evidence of the assessment process our regional accrediting body (Higher Learning Commission) requires.

Reports should be written for a naïve audience. It is helpful to define field-related terms and acronyms, and to include examples of disciplinary-related concepts. Provide a summary of the assessment results. Be sure the results can be easily interpreted by multiple audiences.

Assessment Project FAQs

These are just a few common questions regarding assessment and the General Education Assessment process at Chandler-Gilbert Community College. For additional questions or details, contact your Assessment Coach, a SLOAC Fellow, or the CTLA.