| Student
input sought by new learning assessment team
BY
MATT GETTY
Many
popular rankings of universities, colleges, and their programs give
the impression that academic quality is all about what kind of students
a school admits. For example, the often-cited U.S. News and World
Report’s rankings concentrate more on charting the credentials
of incoming freshmen than on measuring the knowledge and skills
of outgoing graduates. To establish a more useful yardstick for
academic quality at AU, the university’s Learning Outcomes
and Assessment Team is helping programs throughout AU answer obvious
but difficult questions—What should our students be learning?
Are we teaching them what they need to know?
Launched
last year as part of AU’s Middle States reaccreditation process,
the 18-person, cross-divisional team has helped academic programs
take the first steps toward answering these questions by defining
clear learning goals and developing tools to measure whether or
not those goals are reached. “We had to make the mental shift
from looking at transcripts as evidence of student learning to looking
at real outcomes,” explained College of Arts and Sciences professor
Lyn Stallings, who cochairs the team along with Cathy Schaeff, biology,
CAS. “It was difficult at first, but it’s just a matter
of asking yourself questions like, ‘If a graduate goes to a
job interview and someone asks them a substantive question about
their major, can they answer it?’”
Even
more challenging than this “mental shift,” however, has
been the process of developing assessment strategies, which vary
widely from one program to the next. As director of institutional
research and assessment Karen Froslid-Jones put it, “What might
work in one department might not work in another.” A program
that is skill-based, for instance, such as journalism or performing
arts may need a portfolio or capstone evaluation, while more knowledge-based
programs may use comprehensive exams.
For
this reason, the outcomes and assessment process has been driven
from the bottom up rather than the top down. “This isn’t
something coming from the outside,” Stallings explained. “It’s
not the administration telling the departments, ‘This is how
you should do it.’ It’s coming from the faculty and the
students.” The team, made up of faculty and staff from across
the university, has held several workshops seeking broad faculty
input over the last year and is now formally seeking student input.
“Key
in this process is student involvement,” said Stallings, who
teaches in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. “Our
statistics students, for instance, recently reported on their internships
and told us they felt they needed more writing in their courses.
That’s the type of thing we might not have known without their
input.” This week, the team has invited all interested students
to attend “What Does it Mean to be an AU Grad?” a Nov.
19 presentation on the project’s progress and student participation,
sponsored by the Center for Teaching Excellence.
With
learning outcomes and plans for assessment scheduled to be in place
by the end of this semester, the team is moving ahead with its goal
for next term: to ask all programs to begin reporting on whether
or not they’re meeting their outcomes by the end of the spring
semester. Yet, “The process is more important than the results,”
explained Froslid-Jones. Both she and Stallings stressed, the purpose
of evaluation is not to punish programs that aren’t achieving
their learning outcomes and reward those that are. “This is
about the university’s continuous improvement. We’d much
rather learn that students aren’t learning what they’re
supposed to and make changes to correct that than simply not know
anything,” said Froslid-Jones.
The
Learning Outcomes and Assessment Team’s presentation, “What
Does it Mean to be an AU Grad?” is scheduled for 11:30 a.m.
to 12:45 p.m. in Hurst 203, Friday, Nov. 19. Students interested
in attending can RSVP by e-mailing Joanna.Bryden@american.edu. |
