Institutional Day
of Assessment
Mar 20, 2015
9:00 am – 3:00 pm
UCEN-107
Andy McCutcheon
Rebecca Eikey
Purpose
• What are the Essential Learning Outcomes of Liberal
Education and America’s Promise?
• How are Institutional Learning Outcomes related to
your course assignments?
• Would you like to make your course assignments
more meaningful and authentic?
• What are Signature Assignments and how can they
be used to assess student learning?
• How can student reflection be useful in assessment?
“A collaboration between
educators, students,
policymakers, and business
and community leaders.”
How is the
Workplace Changing?
“Human work will increasingly shift toward two kinds of
tasks:
• solving problems for which standard operating
procedures do not currently exist,
• and working with new information—acquiring it,
making sense of it, communicating it to others….”
Frank Levy and Richard Murnane, “Dancing with Robots” (2013)
Learning Agility
The LEAP Initiative Promotes
•Essential Learning Outcomes
•A Guiding Vision and National Benchmarks for College Learning and
Liberal Education in the 21st Century
•High Impact Practices
•Helping Students Achieve the Essential Learning Outcomes
•Authentic Assessments of Student Learning
•Probing Whether Students Can APPLY Their Learning – to Complex
Problems and Real-World Challenges
•Seven Principles of Excellence, including Inclusiveness
•Diversity, Equity, Quality of Learning for All Groups of Students
Goal: Raise the Quality of
College Learning
• Large-scale collaboration
• Transformational change
• Educational alignment
Narrow Learning is Not Enough
The Essential Learning Outcomes
 Knowledge of Human Cultures and the Physical and Natural World
• Focused on engagement with big questions, enduring and contemporary
 Intellectual and Practical Skills
• Practiced extensively across the curriculum, in the context of progressively more
challenging problems, projects, and standards for performance
 Personal and Social Responsibility
• Anchored through active involvement with diverse communities and real-world
challenges
 Integrative and Applied Learning
• Demonstrated through the application of knowledge, skills, and responsibilities to new
settings and complex problems
Authentic Assessments
• As part of its VALUE (Valid Assessment of Learning in
Undergraduate Education) project, AAC&U worked
with faculty and other academic and student affairs
professionals in an exhaustive process of gathering,
analyzing, synthesizing, and drafting institutional-level
rubrics for the Essential Learning Outcomes.
• 32,729 individuals participated in consortia approach
• 5661 institutions use the VALUE rubrics
VALUE Rubrics
• Contain the most common and broadly shared criteria
or core characteristics considered critical for judging
the quality of student work in that outcome area.
• Reflect faculty expectations for essential learning
across the nation regardless of type of institution,
mission, size or location.
Outcomes Build Upon
Each Other
Proposed Six ILOs
Effective Communication
Critical Thinking
Working with Others
Information Literacy
Quantitative Literacy
Community Engagement
Signature Assignments
• What are signature assignments?
• How are signature assignments designed?
What are Signature Assignments?
• An assignment that best displays the knowledge or
skills essential to the learning outcomes of a course.
Other coursework should build toward the completion
of the course 'signature' assignment.
• Signature assignments have the potential to help us
know whether student learning reflects “the ways of
thinking and doing of disciplinary experts.”
• A generic task, problem, case, or project that can be
tailored or contextualized in different disciplines or
course contexts (can be collaboratively designed).
Characteristics for Success
• Course-embedded assessment
• Well aligned with Learning Outcomes
• Authentic in terms of process/content, “real world”
application
• Include student reflection component
• Collaboratively designed by faculty
• Can follow a theme across curricular and co-curricular
experiences
Examples of
Signature Assignments
Salt Lake Community College (SLCC)
• Political science class: students analyze campaign
finance data and write papers about recent
elections in Utah.
• Quantitative reasoning class: students analyze
arguments they’ve found on TV or the Internet for
logical fallacies, making diagrams to help map the
process.
Examples of
Signature Assignments
Salt Lake Community College (SLCC)
• Composition class: students write papers in
different genres—such as a position paper, a
review, and a memoir—all on the same chosen
topic.
• Mathematics class: students acted as potential car
buyers and calculated how different interest rates
affect the amount of money spent.
Guidelines Applied
Salt Lake Community College (SLCC)
• Used for General Education Outcomes
• Faculty freedom to create the signature
assignments, but with the following guidelines:
• address at least two learning outcomes
• include student reflection
• demonstrate a real world, not theoretical, application
of disciplinary knowledge
Pair-Share Activity
• Match your Signature Assignment
to at least two ILOs
• Pair with a neighbor and share
why you selected the ILOs
• Share your findings with the rest
of the group
Break
10:45 – 11:00
Use of Reflection in Assessment
“I cannot teach anybody anything,
I can only make them think.”
-Socrates
Use of Reflection in Assessment
What is Metacognition?
“Although the term metacognition is a relatively recent
invention, its practice is as old as rational thought. As
long as people have evaluated ideas for their quality and
sought to improve those ideas, they have performed
metacognitive operations” (Martinez 699).
Use of Reflection in Assessment
The Benefits of Self-Reflection
• Metacognitive activities make learning more visible, both for
students and instructors.
• Self-reflection not only enhances student learning but
fosters an attitude of life-long learning.
• Student reflection chronicles the learning process and offers
artifacts of rich qualitative data that help instructors
measure their own effectiveness through more authentic
assessment.
Use of Reflection in Assessment
Types of Self-Reflection
With a well-crafted prompt, a signature assignment can
encourage students to reflect upon:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
their completed work
their learning process
their performance
their work habits
their effort
their weaknesses and strengths
their goals
and even future applications of the skills and knowledge
they have gained.
Use of Reflection in Assessment
Why Is Reflection Important?
“Metacognitive ability is central to conceptions of what it
means to be educated. The world is becoming more
complex, more information-rich, more full of options,
and more demanding of thinking. With these changes,
the importance of metacognitive ability as an
educational outcome can only grow” (Martinez 699).
Pair-Share Activity
• Using the Signature Assignment Planning
Template, identify the types of reflection
prompts you plan to use in your Signature
Assignment (question 9).
• Pair with a neighbor and share why you
selected these types of reflection.
• Share your findings with the rest of the
group.
Lunch Break
12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Peer Review Activity
• Exchange Signature Assignment prompt with
your neighbor
• Use the Peer Review Form to analyze your
neighbor’s Signature Assignment
• Return the completed Peer Review Form to
your neighbor
• Discuss your findings together
• Share your findings with the rest of the group
Questions?
Next Steps
• Implement Signature Assigment
• Collect student work
• Form an Institutional Learning Outcome
Assessment work group
• Explore the use of ePortfolio in capturing
student work
Use of ePortfolios
http://facultyeportfolioresource.weebly.com/eportfolioexamples-to-show-your-students.html
Post Workshop Assignment
• Revised Signature Assignment with Rubric
• Meta-Narrative
• Three samples of student work (high,
medium, low)