Two faculty from unrelated fields (audiology and interior design) recently presented on how their respective programs use assessment plans. Both concur that assessment is generally just “good practice.” Within the general push to encourage assessments, programs have flexibility and may focus on different aspects to build in different years.

Both faculty are from fields with external accrediting agencies, which focus on the building of knowledge and skills in learners, and their feedback has enhanced the functioning of both programs. Audiology involves a 40-hour clinical practicum with real patients at a speech and hearing center. The interior design program focuses on designing for a sustainable future, with assessments ranging from exams to internships.

The data collected is continuously assessed with accreditation visits in two or three year cycles. Special focus areas (diversity, assessment) may be assigned for programmatic attention.

Different Manifestations of Student Learning Objectives (SLOs)

While the national accrediting agencies in the various fields set direction (diversity across the life span, integrity and ethics), different universities’ programs define student learning objectives (SLOs) differently but are “getting at the same thing.” Institutional capacities may differ to a degree. And different faculty bring different focuses. Still, the assessment approach helps in the evaluations of I/O (inputs and outputs).

For the programs, they have been working to sort their SLOs to relate them to university outcomes.

Necessarily Top-Down

The presenters concurred that program assessment must necessarily be top-down, not a bottom-up process. This way, the assessment is program-level, centralized, and more aligned. These assessments may draw in student assessments of their individual courses, too, but that’s in context of an overall programmatic endeavor. It’s not just “who wants to teach this” in terms of faculty assignments to particular courses or the curriculum that may be used.

Assessment is not “just to appease the university,” they emphasized. It is a critical part of preparing students to meet program goals.

One administrator (and faculty member) suggested that a centralized program focus helps create a sense of shared endeavor. “Anybody can criticize anything,” he observed. The idea here is rather to get people working together in the same direction. People buy in to the purpose of the assessment. They become more aware of program goals. They articulate their philosophy as educators. They form a common purpose in the pgoram for educating and supporting the students.

They also work together to communicate with the various stakeholders to the program: the accreditors, the administrators, new faculty, and prospective students.

Omitting Redundancies in Critical Contents

After reviewing program goals, the program evaluators determine critical content. They formulate student learning objectives, and then see where each is addressed for each program goal. They identify critical content to the learning, and also peripheral contents. The findings from the assessments may feed decision-making about how to distribute SLOs among various courses in the curriculum, without individual professor preferences over-riding the process. The programs strive to be student-centered, not faculty-centric.

The group then develops assessment tools for individual SLOs. These are designed to give students an opportunity to repair their grades in a course…by having multiple evaluative opportunities. The programs have a vested interest in student successes rather than forcing student failures. There are always “gaps” in clinical practicums, and the professionals teaching in this field aim towards supporting the audiology learning.

This focus on the finer details of student learning enable faculty to better understand learner performance and also problem areas. They get a clearer sense of what students are getting in terms of critical content. They are not generalizing learning results from one cumulative grade, but more nuanced multiple measures.

Disaggregating Learning

In interior design, the faculty measure what matters to the program by breaking down the SLOs at the level of measureable learning. If line weight is an important concept, then that is something that is measured based on the various projects that students do. They will use rubrics to grade particular items. The faculty identify no more than three places where a particular SLO will be taught and measured, so as not to dilute the focus. They clump like-items for SLOs. “Not everything taught in a class is an SLO,” the presenter quipped. “There are not 50 to a course.” With the use of cumulative capstone courses, some SLOs are shared in common in certain projects.

They maintain high rigor but also pursue simple methods that work succinctly. The program keeps a small amount of student work on hand as learning samples.

The periodic look-backs on critical content during the semester ensure that there is no redundancy in the curriculum (as when a faculty member teaches a favorite part of a curriculum even if it may not directly apply to a particular course). This way, redundancy may be omitted. This helps keep the program current. It also gives faculty a direction about what to teach.

A Purposive Curriculum through Teamwork

Both programs clearly involved plenty of good will among colleagues as well as teamwork. Regular meetings around camaraderie-building, assessment measures, and problem-solving allow them to do mid-stream adjustments. For the interior design program, the administrators let all job applicants know how the department functions during the hirng process.

One of the presenters cautioned against knee-jerk fall-backs to “academic freedom” as a way to stop constructive changes from assessments and accreditation reviews. He said that faculty communication is critical for such discussions, and people can then sit down and talk about differences instead of exchanging “mean emails.”