 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Assessment Day: Cooperating to better serve students at SCI
When Springfield College resumes its general education assessment program April 2, it will be an important step toward meeting the demands of external stakeholders and accrediting agencies. More about them later. If we all work together, it will also give us the information we need to serve our students better. And that, rather than accreditation, is where I hope we can keep our focus: Better serving our students.
We're calling it "Assessment Day," but we're not taking the whole day. During the 11 o'clock hour Wednesday, April 2, sophomores eligible for graduation will take a 40-minute standardized reading test at a location yet to be determined. It will be followed by a free food day for all who take part in assessment. During the 11 o'clock class period, we are asking instructors to excuse sophomores from class and administer a brief survey to the remaining students.
"It's a survey of student needs and satisfaction with services on our campus," said Student Affairs Dean Kevin Broeckling, who is designing the survey. "We want to know what our students feel that we need to make our priority on campus, how students feel about their time at SCI and what our staff can do to better meet their needs."
The reading test lasts 40 minutes. It is part of the Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency (CAAP) developed by ACT Inc. We chose an ACT product so results from April's test can be compared with results from our placement testing and tests taken by high school students throughout Illinois. The test is normed, so we will be able to make comparisons to national norms as well. Over time, we will gain a better understanding of how well our students read and what they're learning at SCI
"Assessment ... will help us to measure our strong points as well as our weaknesses so we know where improvements must be made, and where we are already doing well," said Susan Full, head librarian and a member of the standardized testing subcommittee of SCI's Assessment Committee. Students gain the satisfaction, she added, of "knowing that (they) helped ensure high-quality education for future generations of SCI students."
That's where it becomes important that we all work together. We have to make the case to our students that it's worth their time to take the tests, complete the surveys and otherwise help with assessment. I think we can get their cooperation if we show we're all operating as a team that they're a part of, and if we let them know we're using the information we get from them to improve the school. I've learned in 10 years of teaching here to put a lot of faith in our students, and my reading of the assessment literature doesn't give me a lot of faith in the alternatives.
At Truman University in Kirksville, Missouri (formerly Northeast Missouri State), for example, students complained they weren't given good reason for taking taking a battery of standardized tests as juniors. "The majority of the people around me filled in the bubbles (on the answer sheet) and then started on their homework," said one. "I don't think it tested people's knowledge, and I don't think that it is very accurate," she added. In the cold light of fact, she may have been exactly right - at least insofar as her own performance was concerned. Standardized tests like the CAAP are good for making broad comparisons, but they don't always measure individual students very well.
Truman has one of the best assessment programs in the nation. But when members of SCI's Assessment Committee saw the article about testing at Truman last fall, we decided we have to make a concerted effort at SCI to communicate the whys and hows of assessment testing to our students. I think the most important thing is to make it clear to our students that we're evaluating ourselves, not them, when we do assessment. I think we can be honest with them that assessment is not an exact science, that we're using the test results to formulate hypotheses - make educated guesses - about what we can do better to help them learn. It ain't, to put it succinctly, rocket science.
"A colleague who's a chemist throws up his hand at all this," says Linda Suskie, director of the American Association for Higher Education's Assessment Forum. "Having obtained controlled results in a laboratory, he finds assessment so full of imprecision that, he says, we can never have confidence in our findings. But to me this is what makes assessment so fascinating. The answers aren't there in black and white; we have, instead, a puzzle. We gather clues here and there, and from them try to infer an answer to one of the most important questions that educators face: What have our students truly learned?"
We're learning, too, as we get SCI's assessment plan up and running again. Few of us on the Assessment Committee are experts. We're doing our best to put SCI's 1996 assessment plan into action, but our learning curve is steep and our time is short. Our chief outside stakeholder, the North Central Association, in 2001 noted "the College is working to build 'a culture of assessment' to help faculty take ownership of these assessment process and to recognize its value to their programs." But NCA added, rather pointedly, "Results should be quite evident at the time of the next (accreditation review) team visit."
Again, we're in a situation that cries out for teamwork.
Mahn, Rachel. "Test Results Affect State Allocations." The Truman University Index 10 Oct. 2002.
Suskie, Linda. "Fair Assessment Practices: Giving Students Equitable Opportunities to Demonstrate Learning." AAHE Bulletin May 2000 http://www.aahebulletin.com/public/archive/may2.asp?pf=1
Thanks to everyone ...
Thanks to all who turned in their faculty assessment reports in December and January. We have reports in from almost all full-time faculty and a good percentage of adjunct instructors as well. We're compiling the results and hope to report back to you before the end of the school year. But a quick look at the surveys suggests that more and more teachers at SCI are aware of the need for assessment and are using multiple measures to get a reading on what students are learning in their classrooms.
Details (and a link) about the CAAP test
On Wednesday, April 2, SCI sophomores will be required to take the reading component of the Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency (CAAP) test as part of SCI's General Education assessment plan (Gen Ed testing is one of three parts of our overall assessment plan). The CAAP reading test lasts 40 minutes and measures learning in two areas: (1) reading skills, including the ability to "recognize main ideas of paragraphs and passages, to identify important factual information, and to identify relationships among different components of textual information;" and (2) reasoning skills, including "ability to determine meaning from context, to infer main ideas and relationships, to generalize and apply information beyond the immediate context, to draw appropriate conclusions, and to make appropriate comparisons." Readings are drawn from prose fiction, humanities, social studies and natural science. Visit http://www.act.org/caap/ for sample questions and more information.
-- Pete Ellertsen, editor, Nuts & Bolts
Nuts & Bolts is an electronic newsletter published by the Assessment Committee of Springfield College in Illinois.
Members of the Assessment Committee are: Bob Blankenberger; Susan Full; Alice Gutierrez; Kathleen Killion; Penny Leonhard; Scott McCullar; Steve Stowers; Jeff Mueller and Kevin Broeckling (ex officio); and Pete Ellertsen, chair. If you have information, comments or feedback, please contact any committee member or editor Pete Ellertsen, in Becker L-16A on the SCI campus, 525-1420 ext. 519 or by e-mail at ellertsen@sci.edu.