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Robert Gabriner, Moderator, Learning Assessment Listserv
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In his keynote address at the recent Student Success conference, Lee Shulman,
President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, stated
that colleges would do well to take ownership of the
student learning outcomes challenge and solve it on our terms. For those
who are willing to accept this challenge, the overriding question is "how, in
actual practice, can an institution actually do this?" This was the question I
had to confront head-on in 2000 when I became System Director for Academic
Accountability for the Minnesota State Colleges and
Universities system. A systematic analysis at that time convinced me
that conventional academic process could not attain the growing and solidifying
expectations of accreditors. Nor did the many ad hoc solutions of the 1990's
provide anything more than approaches that were piecemeal, expensive, and hard
to sustain. In sum, there was (at that
time) no feasible option whereby colleges could choose to do this well.
It was out of a determination to provide better options for academic
institutions that the eLumen Collaborative was created. Viewing ourselves as an
independent innovative academic R&D firm, we set out to fundamentally solve the
long-standing problem of the organizational invisibility of student achievement.
We sought to find a foundation that would underwrite this endeavor and make the
resulting solution available
to colleges at no cost to them. However, we found no one who would do
this, and ended up doing it ourselves, taking the classic risk that of creating
a better mousetrap. Our approach has been to change as little possible and as
much as necessary to create an approach that is good for students, for faculty
and for legislators.
Since we were willing to design from scratch, we set as our goal to
fundamentally solve the long-standing problem of the organizational invisibility
of student achievement. We have succeeded, creating a Web- delivered SLO system
whose management is distributed across an academic institution and which permits
that institution to easily apply expected student achievements and generate
aggregated data in actual student achievements wherever and whenever they
choose.
We chose to make embedded assessment easy to do, focusing on activities that
students are already doing and judgments that instructors are already making.
The key underlying differences from present practice is 1) that authorized
persons each pay attention to and contribute data on the student activities that
they have in front of them and 2) that these student activities are evaluated
relative to shared standards. Standards here means defined SLOs and explicit
evaluation criteria (rubrics). The actual scoring are entered via any Web-liked
device and only requires clicking and pointing. These judgments are entered at
the point that the judgments are made. ( In the Health Sciences at Kirkwood
Community College, this often means using a hand-held computer in a wireless
environment.)
The system captures data at the granular level (this student, this SLO, this
rubric level, this setting, this date/time) and generates real-time access to
data based on authorized roles. One direction of aggregation is for any specific
student or set of students. Another is for course section (only seen by the
instructor), catalog course, academic program, and the entire college. Another
is for SLO and achievement areas
containing similar SLOs. Specific defined reports create combinations of
these. There is visibility of actual educational results, therefore, from bottom
(a specific student) to top (institution-wide assessment metadata). In summary,
this process is both simple and powerful.
This explanation appears to suggest that the purpose of all this is to create
data, but the data are just the means to another end, refocusing
the college on student learning. Colleges who are using it report that
the first change in the college has been the way faculty discuss student
learning. Then, using this process selectively offers insight into
student learning for whatever courses assess students. Using the same process
more offers insight into student learning in the various areas of achievement --
writing or math or critical thinking. Using the same process more extensively
provides insight into the learning of specific
students across courses and across areas of achievement.
This has been available to colleges for three years. In that time, 13 colleges
have chosen to begin to use it, each in their own way: general education,
professional and technical programs, liberal arts disciplines, special programs.
The newest release handles co-curricular activities. It is useful to see how
other colleges have chosen to do this, but each college will make its own
decisions based on its own local circumstances.
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