Assessment
Understanding what students are learning is essential to improving one's teaching practice. Professors at all institutions are being asked to do more to assess their students' learning, but often they have little preparation in doing so.
In an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Donna Heiland and Laura J. Rosenthal observed, "Good assessment can give us concrete information about whether students are learning, how much they are learning, and in what areas... Some faculty embrace assessment efforts, some are highly critical of them, but most, perhaps, are barely aware of them. Why is this so and should we do something about it?"
The projects linked below sought to do something about it. While these projects are at varying stages of development, all have already created tools and resources that can be used both to illuminate student learning and to enhance effective teaching and advising.
Among the goals of these projects were to:
- define student learning outcomes;
- alert faculty to assessment methodologies and best practices;
- better utilize technology in assessment;
- measure the effectiveness of particular assessment practices; and
- disseminate and sustain the use of these practices across ACM campuses.
Central to all of the projects linked below is faculty development: the collaborative nature of these projects involved faculty taking charge of their own learning by asking questions and exhibiting the metacognitive strategies that students are asked to utilize. Working together, faculty were able to develop instruments that can be used across institutions to measure student learning.
Relevant FaCE Projects
- Assessing Student
Learning in the Liberal Arts: Sharing Best Practices (Spring 2012)
- CLA in the Classroom Academy (Spring 2008) Can your students construct successful arguments?
- ePortfolios: Electronic Pasta (Spring 2010)
- Faculty Assessment of Student learning (Spring 2008)
- First-Year Learning Outcomes and their Assessment (Fall 2009)
- Successful Liberal Arts Students: Reflecting on the Development of Student Skills and Agency (Spring 2012)
- Transformative Learning Experiences for New Teachers (Spring 2009)