Personal Stakes in Assessment; Issues, Requests

From '08 Summer Institute:


Personal Stakes:

• team 1: departments do not communicate well among themselves. no consensus. no agreement about basic assumptions about dept subject matter, let alone communication requirements. departments have not invested in assessing communication skills within the departments.
• team 3: faculty agree that communication assessment needs to be happening, but who is going to take responsibility for it.
• team 7 (engineering): meet abet standards. this is at the course level/as well as the departmental level, so faculty are staked in the process. requirements are specific to each college and to each department.
• team 6: assistant profs are more focused at the classroom level. associate profs start working at the department level. stakes change depending on level. a&d accredidation does include communication elements.
• team 4: accredidation at the college level vs. the university level changes the stakes for the faculty.
• team 2: how do you grade students fairly? int'l studies relatively new (9yrs old); had to invent a matrix--5 skills/knowledge-types, all content, no process. criteria in the intro and exit courses.

Issues:

• authentic assessment. student and faculty buy-in.
• if students are not graded on their final "tests" of knowledge(exit exams), how do you get them to take it seriously?
• a&d needs more buy-in for cxc, but also needs more emphasis college-wide involving writing.
• matrices need to more discipline-specific matrices. vague vs. tight: students need structure, but they also need room to experiment. how do you balance?
• departments/colleges have nuances that make consistent matrices difficult.
• balance student effort vs. actual quality of product (this is a place where iterations, revisions can really take effort into account, because they have a chance to incorporate feedback).

Requests:

• speak to our departments about instituting agreed upon assessment criterion (a&s)
• cooperative learning communities across disciplines with communication "experts" (a&d)

Action items:

• Look at assessment matrices for each department. Share with other faculty members participating in SI. Sign into your paws account; planning resources --> choose department and degree program.