Please remember to announce to your students: Assessment day is Wednesday, March 28. Testing is mandatory for all SCI sophomores.
As in past years, most instructors reported using pre- and post-tests to
determine "value added," i.e. a rough indication of what students learned in
their specific courses. The number came out to 66 percent. In this year's
report, Brian lumped together several other CATs for analysis.
Minute papers, muddiest point questions, directed paraphrasing, three-question surveys, RSQC2, and misconception/preconception checks each involve a brief written response to the day’s class. If these instruments are binned together, then modified versions of them might also be moved from the “other” category. The remaining “other” instruments may be divided into essentially informal techniques and unique, but formal assessment instruments.Using this methodology, Brian was able to estimate written CATs were used by 64 percent of instructors, and "some type of formal assessment instrument was used in approximately 93 percent of the reported courses."
As in the past, Brian's survey noted an over-reliance on informal assessments that "cannot be verified by an outside observer" and therefore are of limited value "when outside accreditation teams wish to evaluate our programs" even though he acknowledged they "are quite valuable for [the] purpose" of formative assessment, i.e. measuring student learning during the semester when it's still soon enough to modify our classroom teaching practices in light of the data we gather.
In all, I think it's good we're using a variety of assessment techniques. And I'm encouraged that we're using written measures in so many of our classrooms. Measuring the cognitive skills associated with reading and writing is central to our assessment plan, and the CAT survey suggests we're writing across the curriculum even if we don't have a formal Writing Across the Curriculum program. Especially at a small college, I think we can do as well -- or better -- without taking on the headaches of launching some kind of formal WAC initiative.
Sati Maharaj of South Carolina's College of Charleston, director of a WAC project for the Appalachian College Association, advises people who are starting up a WAC program, "Start small (some programs started with as few as 5-10 participants)." We have at least that many instructors assigning extensive writing in their classes, in addition to the freshman English composition teachers who specialize in writing. Maharaj adds, "Don’t try to convert faculty; simply take on board those who are willing to participate. ... Offer to help. Talk one-on-one with interested colleagues; invite them to have coffee or lunch or to visit your office, etc." On that level, I believe, we already have WAC at SCI/Benedictine. You don't always need a formal program to do good things in the classroom.
Maharaj also has a list of common misconceptions about WAC and writing instruction in the disciplines. It's worth repeating here:
Turn the statements around, and you've got a list of best practices! One of the reasons for writing across the curriculum is that every discipline has its own approach to writing, and English teachers can't pretend to know them all -- let alone teach them all -- so it's up to each of us in all our disciplines to teach the kind of writing our students need to master. I know it's true in my field of journalism, where the kind of academic discourse I taught in English 111-12 doesn't meet professional standards.
- Writing across the curriculum is grammar across the curriculum
- Writing is the business of the English Department
- Assigning writing means assigning research papers
- Every piece of students’ writing must be read and graded
- Including writing in your course automatically means that you will cover less content
- Assigning writing means that you must now be an English teacher
- Writing is busy work
- Including writing will increase your workload
- Students should know how to write before they get into college.
Theodore M. Bernstein, longtime copy desk chief for The New York Times and a stickler for precise usage, used to complain about "Miss Thistlebottom," an archetypal English teacher of his creation who decreed "that you must never, never end a sentence with a preposition; that you must never, never split an infinitive ...; that you must never, never use 'none' as a plural," and so on (Watch Your Language 5). Miss Thistlebottom's rules may work in an English classroom, Bernstein said, but they don't for professional writers. "[A]s those who are closely involved with the language examine it more thoroughly and observe what usage does to slowly renovate it, they tend to give the rules a second look, their attitude becomes less frozen" (Miss Thistlebottom's Hobgoblins 7). None of the Miss Thistlebottoms who taught me grammar over the years, by the way, would have disagreed with Bernstein. You've got to know the rules, they'd tell me time and time again, to know when to break the rules. Or when to modify them to meet the needs of real-world writing. The point is the conventions of writing vary from discipline to discipline.
So the Appalachian colleges' approach to Writing Across the Curriculum makes a lot of sense to me.
It makes sense, too, that the standards for assessment will vary from discipline to discipline. At SCI, partly for that reason, we opted not to require an across-the-board standardized writing test as part of our General Education assessment program. Instead, we look at closely-related reasoning skills measured in the Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency (CAAP) reading module. And we leave the most immediately productive part of assessment, the formative in-class measurements that can lead to immediate improvement, to the teachers in the classroom.
Federal testing for IPEDS?
In the latest of a series of moves apparently designed to force standardized testing on colleges and universities, according to the online newsletter Inside Higher Ed, the U.S. Education Department plans to enlarge the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) to include information on standardized testing outcomes. Newsletter staffer Doug Lederman says with the change, announced Jan. 24 in the Federal Register, "the department could go a long way (without potentially controversial legislation or regulatory changes) toward achieving its goal of establishing a federal system for reporting student learning outcomes and other information on colleges’ performance" (parentheses in the original).
The change would be part of an overall proposed expansion of IPEDS. Says Lederman:
Under the “new accountability part,” colleges would be asked a set of four questions. Some are straightforward; the department asks if institutions have online “fact books” and if they post information on their Web sites about assessment or student learning outcomes, and requests links to those pages, which the department says it would add to the Web-based College Opportunities Online Locator.It's hard to tell what all of this might mean. It may be worthy of notice, however, that the Collegiate Learning Assessment mentioned in the Federal Register is the standardized test touted by Charles Miller, who chaired a blue-ribbon commission last year for the Education Department that recommended nationwide standardized testing for colleges and universities.But the department also asks whether colleges use specific student learning assessments, such as the National Survey of Student Engagement, Community College Survey of Student Engagement, Collegiate Learning Assessment, and National Measure of Academic Proficiency and Progress, and to specify which other assessment tools they use. Colleges would also be asked to say if the institution makes its results on these measures available online on its own Web site, and to provide the appropriate Web address, which would also be added to the COOL Web site.
The department’s plan would also ask (and by 2008-9 require) colleges to provide, in matrix form, data on all accountability measures they use and “the institution’s score” on those measures. (The document does not make clear whether this information would be shared with the public, but if it would, colleges that now use these surveys and tests for internal purposes only would presumably be forced to reveal them.) The department’s request that a college report a single score for the institution is likely to renew concerns higher education leaders have expressed that the Spellings Commission’s push for accountability is overly simplistic, since most accountability measures that institutions use can’t be summed up in one “score.”
Bernstein, Theodore M. Miss Thistlebottom's Hobgoblins: The Careful Writer's Guide to the Taboos, Bugbears and Outmoded Rules of English Usage. 1971. New York: Noonday, 1991.
__________. Watch Your Language: A Lively, Informative Guide to to Better Writing, Emanating from the News Room of The New York Times. Great Neck, NY: Channel, 1958.
Lederman, Doug. "Huge IPEDS Lives." Inside Higher Ed 19 Feb. 2007. http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/02/19/ipeds
Miller, Charles. "Memo from the Chairman." Inside Higher Ed 24 Jan. 2006. http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/01/24/miller