Date: Mon, 22 Aug 2005 08:32:02 -0700 (PDT)
From: peter ellertsen <peterellertsen@yahoo.com> [+] [ ]
Subject: August assessment newsletter [ ]
To: faculty@sci.edu [+], staff@sci.edu [+]
NUTS & BOLTS
An electronic assessment newsletter
Springfield College in Illinois
-----------------------------------------
August 2005
Vol. 6 No. 1
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Editor's note: Due to technical difficulties beyond my
control, I am temporarily unable to post documents to
SCI's assessment website. This issue of Nuts & Bolts
went out in a hard-copy format to returning SCI
instructors before the Aug. 16 faculty meeting. In
order to make it available to staff and new faculty
who were not yet assigned mailboxes at that time, I am
re-transmitting it. As soon as the technical problems
are resolved, I plan to post an archival copy of this
issue to the internet and resume publication on SCI's
website at <www.sci.edu>. -- Pete Ellertsen, chair,
assessment committee
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Explaining SLOs to students --
Syllabus reform: Now comes the fun part
With fall semester classes starting next week, we've
come to the end of the first round of getting our
syllabi in the SCI traditional and New Horizons
programs to conform to new Student Learning Objectives
(SLOs in the vernacular) reflecting SCI's mission
statement in our daily classroom activities.
Considering the complexity of the new format, the
opacity of pedagogical exegesis and the bugs that go
along with any new initiative, I think we all deserve
a pat on the back for a job -- mostly -- well done.
The next hurdle comes next week, when we take our new
syllabi, with their bright, shiny, new Common Student
Learning Objectives (CSLOs) and Course Based Student
Learning Objectives (CBSLOs) into the classroom. How
do we explain them to the students? I think that's
something each of us is going to have to work out
individually, but at some of the SLO workshops we held
in July and August, we talked it over. Some comments
from instructors:
-- "CSLOs? CBSLOs? The students aren't going to have
any idea what we're talking about.
-- "Well, we're going to have to teach it."
-- "Oh, that's going to be fun!"
In the end, it's a dialog. Fun or not, we're going to
have to teach the new learning objectives. But fun or
not, it'll be useful. If it does nothing else,
revising our syllabi to fit the new CSLO/CBSLO format
is making us think what we teach again. And that, as
Martha Stewart might say, is a good thing. (Now she's
out of jail, I've been thinking about Martha Stewart
and government mandates this summer.) The format
itself is pretty cut-and-dried. But what we put into
it -- how we teach to the Common SLOs -- is still a
matter for individual initiative.
In reviewing syllabi from different disciplines, I've
been struck by the variety of challenges we face. What
I teach in my mass communications classes would not
work in freshman English composition (and vice versa).
Nor would my ways of doing things necessarily be
appropriate in macroeconomics, a humanities survey,
college algebra, forensic science, figure drawing or
two-dimensional design. So I have no particular advice
for instructors on how to introduce our new standard
SLOs when we go through the syllabus on the first day
of class. How we explain our new syllabi depends on
our individual teaching styles, the courses we're
teaching, our best guess why students are taking the
course (is it required? an elective?), maybe even the
weather and the time of day ... in short, too many
imponderables to consider.
But here are a couple of things I do plan to say, and
urge all of us to say:
-- Precisely nailing down our learning objectives and
relating them to the mission statement are part of
assessment, and assessment is a way of ensuring our
students get their money's worth. We're required to do
it, sure, but we're using the assessment results to
improve the education they're getting.
-- The SLOs in the syllabus are not just a
bureaucratic exercise. They are what I look at when
I'm making out the midterm and the final, and they're
what I want students to look at when they write their
reflective essays (a powerful assessment tool, by the
way) at semester's end. In other words, we're not
going to blow them off.
-- Relating SLOs -- and almost everything else we do
-- to the mission statement is a good idea, because it
helps us focus on what it is that that makes SCI
unique.
We do a lot with mission statements in my masscom
classes, because an organization's mission is basic to
integrated marketing communications. But I plan to
talk about mission in freshman comp, too. After
working pretty intensively with SCI's mission
statement the last few months, I've come to see it in
a new light. I now think it's basic to what we do.
An unabashed plug for a new book
One of the most exciting new things to hit the
publications world since the latest volume in the
Harry Potter series is "Classroom Assessment for
Continuious Improvement: A Guide for Instructors," hot
off the presses at SCI. (Of course it hasn't been that
long a time since Harry Potter.) We've been handing it
out at the CSLO/CBSLO workshops, and we'll have more
copies for those who weren't able to attend the
workshops. It reprints several articles from this
newsletter on how to do assessment, and incorporates a
new introduction that tries to explain how the
CSLO/CBSLO format creates a context for classroom
assessment. Questions not addressed: What is the
assessment plan at Hogwarts, and how do the students
there perform on standardized tests?
Nuts & Bolts is an electronic newsletter published by
SCI's Assessment Committee. Faculty members will be
announced later. Pete Ellertsen (English and mass
communications) is chair. Kevin Broeckling, dean of
students, and John Cicero, academic affairs dean,
serve ex officio. The newsletter is available on line
at http://www.sci.edu/assessment/newsarchive.html
link here to back issues of Nuts & Bolts
link here to SCI's assessment website
If you have information, comments or feedback, please
contact any committee member or Nuts & Bolts editor
Pete Ellertsen, in Becker L-16A on the SCI campus,
525-1420 ext. 519 or by e-mail at <ellertsen@sci.edu>.
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