ࡱ> 9;8 "bjbjcTcT 4*>>dd hNPPPPPP$7 "tt    N N   P4 :0 [#[# [# 0 tt [#d m: Notes for Faculty Development Day on Assessment Thanks to the Faculty Development Committee and the University Academic Assessment Committee for organizing this day for us. I know they have worked hard to make this day relevant to you as we work together to develop our assessment plans. I think it says a lot about us as an institution when you, the faculty, acknowledge that professional growth and continuous learning are important parts of your scholarly lives. Thank you for your participation in todays activities. My role today is to talk to you about why I believe assessment is important for our general education program at 9iý޹˾. First, I want to talk briefly about assessment in a broad sense, and then, specifically, about general education assessment at SU. Many of you may know that my scholarly discipline is literacy. Within the discipline of literacy, my specialization is assessment. So you know I have to love it. My sons could bear witness to how important assessment is to me, since I would often try things out with them at home as I was developing my hypotheses and expanding my own understanding of good assessment strategies. Indeed, they might say that they became experts in being assessed. They are probably the only two people on the planet whose mother helped them develop life portfolios in middle school. We called them the big books, and even today they ask about them. What I learned from working with them and with hundreds of students Pre-K through college is about the power of assessment, when used appropriately, to improve learning and teaching. My experience in assessment has been broad and deep. At each level of the development of my learning about assessment, I found that assessment meant beginning with a questionfrom the most basic, Is this student learning the information important to know in the class? to the highest level, How is the student applying his/her learning to questions/issues/challenges in new ways? I began with learning about individual assessment of student learning in a clinical setting. I thought I was assessing whether or not a student had learned a skill and whether they could apply that skill. In truth I was also assessing the effectiveness of my own teaching and how well I could adapt to meet student needs. I later worked with classroom and whole school assessment to determine if programs of instruction were meeting institutional and state goals. At the university I explored how we can teach students to use self-assessment to monitor their own learning. My undergraduates were hesitant and sometimes reluctant to set learning goals and, then, assess whether or not they had met their goals. But in virtually every instance, students applied standards to their learning more rigorously than I would have. Specifically, at the beginning of the semester I outlined the broad areas we would cover in the class. Students, then, developed one or two goals they would try to master in each area by the end of the semester. They would demonstrate that mastery through the development of a portfolio. At the end of the semester I met with each student and listened as he/she presented the portfolio. Each student was asked to assign the grade for the portfolio. Almost without exception students would rate their portfolios lower than I would. I had reserved the right to change the grade if I disagreed, and I often raised them rather than lowered them. While at Southeastern Louisiana University the faculty in the College of Education and Human Development created an elaborate electronic assessment system that allowed us to collect data for a number of academic questions. As we struggled to implementand it was a strugglewe learned to clearly define our questions, to develop and fine-tune numerous assessment tools, to analyze our assessments, and ultimately to revise our curriculum and assessment instruments when they were not serving the goals of our college. The key to assessment across all of these levels is to set important goals, ask good questions about student learning related to those goals, collect data, analyze the data and draw conclusions about student learning, about curriculum, and about the assessment tools themselves, and refine instruction. Its a continuous cycle of questioning, teaching, assessing, new questioning, new teaching, new assessing. So, the question is why is assessment of general education important at 9iý޹˾? I guess a simple answer would be that we need this data for our Middle States report. Thats the equivalent of a parent saying, because I said so when a child asks why he/she has to respond to a parents request. While it is true we need data from assessments to develop our report, I do not believe it is the only, or even the most important, reason why we should develop an assessment plan. We have already established in our strategic plan that our mission as an institution is to cultivate and sustain a superior learning community where students, faculty, and staff engage one another as teachers, scholars, and learners, and where commitment to excellence and an openness to a broad array of ideas and perspectives are central to all aspects of University life. How do we know we are fulfilling our mission to become premier if we do not set standards and outcomes by which we measure our success? If our assessments are appropriate and sound, they will provide us documentation that we are achieving our mission. Assessments will force us to ask tough questions about what our students are learning, what they are not learning, what teaching/learning strategies work for individual students and will motivate us to look for answers to our questions. Assessments will provide us a direction in developing our general education curriculum to insure that students are successful in meeting our learning goals. They will illuminate the gaps, as well as the overlaps in our curriculum, which should help us to make changes and refine our curriculum. Assessments will help us to improve student learning and to demonstrate our success. Assessments should help guide the development of lessons as well as courses in our curriculum. Assessments will improve teaching. As you review the results of our assessments, you will begin to ask how you, as a teacher, can change, improve, add to your lessons to better meet student need. By using assessment data across courses and schools faculty assume the responsibility for developing instruction to meet our strategic plan goals and our accreditation goals, and, more importantly, insure student success. And, almost always, assessment results will raise more questions. I am committed to creating a culture of assessment at 9iý޹˾. 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