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To:
Sara Cooper
Date:
12-9-2013
RE:
Evaluation Plan N620 for Senior FLC – Fall 2013
From:
Jennifer Lillibridge/Professor, School of Nursing
The course that implemented high impact practices was N620, a first semester
nursing research and theory course in the MSN degree (Nursing Leadership Option)
in the School of Nursing. The high impact practices I implemented were First Year
Experiences and Collaboration. The Work Done/Assessment Planned is a
combination of both high impact practices.
First Year Experiences: N620 is one of two, first semester courses in the MSN
graduate program. High impact practices in this area include: small group work
including faculty and student-student interaction; critical inquiry; frequent writing;
information literacy; collaborative learning; learning about scholarship at graduate
level in terms of writing expectations and beginning discussion about research
generally and their culminating research specifically.
Collaboration: N620 uses collaboration in several ways. Both goals of collaboration
are used in this course; learning to work and solve problems in the company of others,
and sharpening one’s own understanding by listening seriously to the insights of
others, especially those with different backgrounds and life experiences.
Work Done/Assessment Planned
1. Developed an efficient discussion rubric for module postings that included
points allocated for participation. Criteria relating to collaboration are:
Generates learning within the community of online MSN cohort as an active
participant.
a. Assessment Plan: Rubric for Discussion Forum was used throughout
the semester. At the end of the semester, the rubric will be reviewed
to determine how well it discriminated in terms of collaboration
amongst students, level of collaboration, and improvement over the
course of the semester. Point allocation in this component of the
rubric will be reviewed for each student to look for trends in
collaboration and improvement over the semester.
b. OUTCOME – based on student postings this rubric was successful. It
did measure/discriminate the level of student preparation and work
and allowed me to assess contribution of students in a collaborative
manner. I was actually amazed at how students found articles for each
other, offered very detailed and thought suggestions for a topic and
how it might be developed or improved. The engagement between
students was great.
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c. The rubric assesses the level of peer responses in terms of how well
students were able to synthesize new information, apply it initially in
their post and then be able to also view what others had written and
provide feedback to their peers.
d. OUTCOME – See b as these comments related to peer responses as
well.
2. Instructor role – engage with students during posting period to stimulate
group discussion on topics so that discussion continued to progress
a. Assessment Plan: Review discussion forum threads to look for
instructor presence during discussion, which facilitated/questioned
postings to move discussion deeper.
b. OUTCOME – this was mixed. I found that the increased workload I
had created for this course by asking students to collaborate
overshadowed my ability to be present more than what had started in
the course initially. This is an area I would change if taught again; a
better recognition of the additional work required for drafts, both
student writing and instructor reading, was not what I had
anticipated. This would be addressed in a revised syllabus that will
better take into account student workload.
3. Student role – motivate peers by responding to posts that present creative
approaches to the topic, provide additional resources and extend learning by
taking the discussion deeper.
a. Assessment Plan: Review number and quality of student responses and
how well they met high impact practices/expectations of graduate
level learning.
b. OUTCOME – this was highly successful as demonstrated in comments
in 1b. Discussion was rich, extended beyond initial posts by students
and the level of collaboration and engagement far exceeded
expectations. Students also posted more often than the minimum
requirement; which led me to believe that there was value in this
process as they were feeling the workload was too high, yet they
continued to post.
4. Frequent writing – Students must post twice a week formally in the
Discussion Forum. The first posting is a substantive post in response to
module specific questions to demonstrate synthesis of learned content and
application of learning through critique/appraisal of published literature.
Also during the posting week, students reply to each other to demonstrate
collaborative engagement with peers. The goal is that students read and
respond to posts by other students, thus enhancing collaborative learning.
The frequency of writing will be tracked over the semester and the quality
assessed under scholarship.
a. Assessment Plan: Research has shown that frequent writing will
improve student work even if no other strategies are implemented.
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Track numbers of posts in Discussion Forum and draft editing of
literature review paper.
b. OUTCOME – I believe this needs further semesters of implementation
to fully assess the outcome well. Although discussion writing
improved, I did not see a substantial improvement in the writing
standard in the larger assignments. It seemed to not carry over into
the writing of a scholarly paper. In part there were several students
who had scored very low on the Writing component of the GRE and
one of those students failed the course in part due to writing. I think
this reason in part resulted in a lack of overall improvement for some
students in their writing. An aside from this is that we have increased
admission requirements to include a higher GRE writing score for
admission to the program.
5. Information Literacy – The literature review assignment has an information
literacy component. Students write their key words/strategy to demonstrate
their ability to research and find appropriate literature for a topic and use it
wisely in the assignment. Students also engage in information seeking for the
Discussion Forum postings.
a. Assessment Plan: Information literacy is a component/criteria of the
literature review assignment rubric. Students must identify key words
and a sophisticated search strategy for the topic including justification
of the inclusion and exclusion criteria used to select literature.
Students received an on campus library session with the librarian
during orientation at the beginning of the semester, have online
tutorials available for review, and consultation with the instructor
available during the semester to assist with skill development. As
these students are BSN graduates, they ‘should’ also have had these
expectations required in previous university work. Part of the
assessment plan will be how well the topic is covered in the paper, the
extent of the differing types of literature used, and the scope of
literature used. This is assessed through the detailed rubric for the
literature review assignment. (Information literacy is a critical
component of all programs in the School of Nursing and is reinforced
in all courses throughout a student’s program)
OUTCOME – Overall this was mixed but in general did not meet
expectations of graduate level work. This work remained at a basic
level throughout the semester. The implementation of sophisticated
search strategies was not apparent in the scholarly work that
required it in the final papers. This first course in the program is
perhaps too soon to have an expectation of more than a basic level. As
the courses have been recently re-sequenced, a course in the second
semester (N660) is now taking this content on in more depth and with
more structure and direction, so I anticipate in the future that these
skills will be developed to meet a graduate level expectation.
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6. Writing/Scholarship – Student writing is assessed in every written
assignment, whether a formal paper or Discussion Forum. Learning to write
scholarly is facilitated by instructor feedback on drafts (and discussion forum
postings) and the peer review process for the literature review assignment.
Scholarship is introduced in this course in terms of graduate level
expectations of content application and writing in all assignments. Students
begin thinking and writing about a topic for the literature review assignment
in this course.
The Literature Review Assignment: One component of this assignment is to
engage in peer review with a designated group of peers to help improve
scholarly writing (peer review guidelines attached). Peer Review Guidelines
were developed for this assignment, which include rationale for this
collaborative activity, the benefits of it, and sample questions to use when
reviewing the work of others. Sample literature reviews were provided to
students to see work in progress and finished submissions.
Assessment Plan:
a. Students will write a reflective piece at the end of the semester about
the peer review process. Specific guidelines for reflection will be
provided to students for this final writing assignment. (Process:
students submit draft paper to peers, obtain feedback, revise multiple
times, submit for feedback to instructor, revise further prior to final
submission)
b. Students will be asked to participate in developing a peer review
rubric for future use based on their experience with this process.
c. Course evaluation that will include an evaluation of the high impact
practices developed for this course.
d. What actually occurred/OUTCOME: Students struggled in this first
course of the master’s program and had very high stress levels. I
introduced peer review as a new activity in the course (I had not
taught it before at graduate level) and did not adjust the level of work
in the remainder of the course to accommodate the new activity. This
proved to be detrimental to the implementation of peer review. This
group of students will take a seminar course next semester (Spring
2014, N660) and will complete a more advanced, broader scope
literature review. I have spoken with the instructor for this course and
will provide all my work on implementing peer review and she will
follow up with students and include this important activity next
semester. The peer review process ultimately became an optional
activity and students did not engage in the process. This is
unfortunate but it is what happened. So they will not write a reflective
piece on the process because students did not complete the activity.
However, the work of creating the Peer Review Guidelines, setting up
the website with groups so this could occur will be passed on to future
instructors of this N620 course and N660. I will also suggest to any
instructor that uses the peer review process that a rubric be
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developed to assess student performance and will make myself
available to assist with this process.