Assessment Resource Guide for Higher Education

As educators strive toward improving student learning outcomes, many find it difficult to instill their students with a deep understanding of the material the instructors share. One challenge lies in how to provide the material with a meaningful and engaging method that maximizes student understanding and synthesis. By following a simple strategy involving Active Learning across the 3 primary domains of Bloom's Taxonomy (cognitive, affective, and psychomotor), instructors can dramatically improve the quality of the lesson and help students retain and understand the information. By applying our strategy, instructors can engage their students at a deeper level and may even find themselves enjoying the process more.

Best Practices in Academic Assessment in Higher Education: A Case in Formative and Shared Assessment

A comparative study of continuous assessment practices.

Well-crafted "Performance Objectives" explain what changes in behavior and skill are expected as the result of having completed the learning content "by when." Performance objectives inform the design, development, learner support, and evaluation plans - based on the data gathered in the needs assessment process. • As the result of having completed the learning content, learners will be able to complete and be evaluated on skill A and skill B after 30 days.

he author discusses the value of Bloom's taxonomy as a heuristic for writing student learning outcomes and other factors faculty should consider when they articulate learning outcomes to describe levels of expertise attained by students who complete an associate's, bachelor's, or graduate degree.

This article describes an experiment in collaborative course design in a midlevel sociology course. Unlike most of the literature on collaborative teaching and learning, which often deals with collaboration among students, this article discusses collaboration between the instructor and students. The students in this course collaborated with the instructor in designing the course--choosing the readings and developing the assignments--from the first day of class. Student feedback on the experiment was overwhelmingly positive. Three major themes that emerged from the student feedback were (1) higher levels of student engagement, (2) a sense of personal accountability, and (3) student empowerment. While the results of the student feedback mostly point to positive experiences, collaboration between students and instructors does bring a high level of uncertainty and extra work for the instructor involved. The article ends with some further guidance for those considering collaborative learning in their classrooms.

To help administrators identify specific actions they can take to support high-impact practices, the authors developed the High-Impact Practices for Administrators Tool. This new self-assessment tool, focused on nine key areas of support, is designed to enable self-reflection at the institutional level. It can be used to identify gaps in support for high-impact practices as well as gaps in communication about currently available support. This article briefly reviews each of the nine broad areas of support the tool is designed to survey.

Over the past two decades, curricula in higher education have increasingly incorporated collaborative learning. However, due to (a) large variations in students’ domain-specific abilities (e.g. knowledge and/or skills) and the effort they invest into the collaboration and (b) teachers’ limited knowledge about how to assess collaborative learning, two main challenges arise.This paper aims to enhance teachers’, researchers’, and students’ awareness for and need to develop what we refer to as ‘collaborative learning assessment literacy’

Bers and Kovala describe an iterative general education assessment process utilized at Oakton Community College from 1999-2003.Prompts were administered to students who had completed at least 31 credits or more, and IR was used to identify individual classes with higher numbers of students who met this criteria. This approach required faculty to donate class time to support assessment efforts that did not necessarily speak directly to the content focus of their respective courses.The article concludes with year-to-year comparisons of data and a general discussion of successes and limitations inherent in the process.

This article provides a valuable synopsis of issues confronting general education assessment at the community college level. The authors make the point that cross-disciplinary collaboration is required; however, assessment need not be focused on the same assignments. Diversity of assignments focused on articulated outcomes may yield more robust data. Beyond common outcomes, the article emphasizes the need for common language on rubrics and promotes the use of AAC&U Value Rubrics. Focusing on general education assessment at the program level (not the course level) helps alleviate typical faculty concerns that assessment is tied to performance evaluation. The article concludes with reference to research that suggests that general education assessment should shift from a focus on what students are learning to how students are learning.