Office of Assessment: Assessment Tools
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Practical Tools for Conceptualizing Your Assessment Plan
Step-by-Step Assessment Checklist – Appendix
(From Andrea Leskes and Barbara Wright, The Art and Science of Assessing General Education Outcomes, AAC&U 2005).
STEP I: Understand the mission, values, traditions, and aspirations of your institution and the role of general education in advancing them.
QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER:
- What are our institution's values, intellectual traditions, or guiding principles that should be evident in the … program?
- What distinguishes education at our institution?
- What makes our … education distinctive from that at comparable campuses?
- How are our intellectual traditions or values reflected in our approach to assessment? Is there congruence between educational ends and assessment means?
STEP 2: Define key learning goals for your students.
QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER:
- What does the faculty agree that all students graduating from our [program or ] institution should know and be able to do?
- What skills, capacities, and knowledge will prepare our students – whatever their areas of concentration – for the complex, diverse, and globally interdependent world of the twenty-first century?
- Are these goals widely known and owned by the entire campus community? How can we enhance buy-in?
STEP 3: Turn your broad learning goals into assessable outcomes; specify the level of accomplishment desired.
QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER:
- Have our broad learning goals been subdivided into more specific outcomes and performance indicators?
- What exactly do we expect our students to know and be able to do with their knowledge in their freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior years?
- How much, and in what ways, do we want our students' level of achievement to increase from novice to advanced over their years of college study?
- What burning questions does our faculty most want to answer?
STEP 4: Select methods for gathering evidence of learning that are appropriate to your desired goals and outcomes.
QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER:
- What assessment method or methods would best provide direct evidence of learning to answer our questions?
- What are we already doing that can also serve assessment purposes?
- What methods would be in keeping with our mission and values?
STEP 5: Determine the crucial points at which you need to gather evidence.
QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER:
- What exactly are our expectations for students' development of knowledge, skills, and values over time?
- What are students already doing, in class or beyond, that can generate evidence for assessment purposes?
- Which are the most important data-collection points in our curriculum and for which outcomes?
- Are our plans effective yet manageable? How will we use the evidence gathered?
STEP 6: Close the improvement loop by ensuring that you interpret and use the evidence collected.
QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER:
- What are our plans for interpreting evidence? Who will be involved? How will we
- manage and support the process?
- Are we satisfied with the learning achieved? If not, what changes are needed?
- What resources are required and available to implement proposed changes?
- What obstacles to change exist and how can they be overcome?
- When will we revisit these changes to see whether they were successful?
- How will we communicate and celebrate our successes?
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