Questions to consider:

1. What are the internal and external motivations for program assessment?
2. What is your department/program doing to assess student learning at the program level?
• What metrics do you use? Who develops them? Who evaluates the results?
• How do you look at the attainment of outcomes at different levels across your program?
• Over what time frame do you assess your program? Yearly, different outcomes in different years, etc.?
• Are you satisfied with your plan? What is working and what isn't?
3. How do you share the results of program assessment with your department? With your university?
4. What are some examples of how program assessment data have been used to make program improvements?
5. What could the geoscience community do to help make program assessment easier or more useful?

• Motivation from institutional pressure, but there is value
• Assessment is about improvement
• Example strategies:
• Evaluate 1-3 outcomes per year rather than evaluating all of them at once
• Embed assessment questions within coursework
• Alumni survey or alumni feedback
• Several groups do pre/post of students, but all are not impressed with results-- both student performance and if it tells us anything
• Some institutions might have support from an office of Institutional Research
• Many geoscience programs are small, so looking at results from year to year with small number of students is difficult
• At one institution, every program is required to provide an annual evaluation report
• example of valid and reliable measures used by this program: Show an example field photograph, students provided example samples and respond to question about the photograph. Expectation for student performance depends on where they are in their coursework. There is a rubric to evaluate student performance.
• University sets aside one day each year that is "assessment day"
• Student participation in "assessment day" is voluntary, department provides pizza, student participation is about 50%
• Students have opportunity to participate in assessment day several times over course of program
• One exercise that has about 7 prompts
• Student self reflection-- students fill out a curriculum matrix to see if students think they are meeting program outcomes where faculty think they are meeting outcomes. Also have a set of questions on end-of-semester evaluations that map onto the program outcomes (e.g., To what degree did this course help you....)
• Some departments have a faculty meeting dedicated to assessment results on an annual basis.
• Having a respected faculty member who cares is important-- someone to lead the effort, but need support of chair
• Sometimes informal discussion with faculty is just as helpful as a dedicated metric
• Helpful strategy might be to use assessment results that are honest to recognize gaps and needs and to leverage that to get resources from university
• Giving newer faculty a voice in curriculum development is important-- new ideas and agency to lead
• What can the geoscience community do to make assessment easier for all of us?
• list of skills/competencies that are needed at the bachelors level-- this is already developed by the Summit on the Future of Undergraduate Geoscience Education
• defined competencies is great, but then we need a question bank that aligned with those competencies
• different programs will have different degrees of competency that are acceptable
• Geoscience Literacy Exam from the InTeGrate project-- intended to assess key literacies-- developed from the literacy documents for Earth Science, etc.
• but GLE is at a literacy level not a geoscience expertise level
• At next year's Rendezvous we should have a question writing workshop to develop program-level assessments. We need help here.
• Develop a group of geoscience assessment consultants