Building a Participatory Culture of Assessment through Everyday Accreditation
Institutional accreditation is meant to support a process of continuous quality improvement across the learning enterprise; but without careful planning, awareness of standards may be limited to a few offices or administrators, and the process of assessment against standards may be compressed into the months before a report comes due. Through interactive activities and sharing of the College of the Marshall Islands’ journey to make accreditation an everyday concern, this workshop will equip attendees with strategies to make accreditation standards part of a campus-wide assessment culture.
Elizabeth Kate Switaj, College of the Marshall Islands
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Accreditation
Embracing a Culture of Assessment at an Arts Conservatory
The Cleveland Institute of Music (CIM)—an independent music conservatory with a 103-year history of training classical music performers and composers—recently underwent a massive shift in its institutional approach to assessment. Prompted by its institutional accreditor, CIM’s faculty, staff, administration, and trustees were unified in their efforts to not only meet minimum standards of accreditation but transform the school by establishing a culture of assessment to improve student learning. In this case study, we detail how CIM accomplished this, including how it engaged its faculty and embraced the challenges of quantifying subjective artistic evaluation.
Dean Southern, Sam Bivens, and Alex Cooke, Cleveland Institute of Music
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Accreditation
How a Small, Underfunded, Understaffed College Won Back its Lost Accreditation and How Assessment Played a Key Role
In 2014, the Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute won back its lost accreditation from the Higher Learning Commission. The driving force was establishing a cultural shift. Specifically, the college had to build a culture of evidence, a culture of continuous improvement, and a culture of planning. This presentation focuses on how assessment (in its many forms) drove those changes, shifted the culture, and won back accreditation.
Edward Hummingbird, Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Accreditation
Jump-Start Your Professional Program’s Assessment Process: Focus on Program Evaluation for Accreditation and Effective Data Communication Strategies
This interactive workshop will help participants develop or fine-tune their program’s evaluation plan in order to satisfy institutional and specialized accreditation requirements for continuous quality improvement. Key elements of an evaluation plan will be addressed, including the identification of program goals and accreditation standards to be evaluated, development and selection of appropriate measures and metrics, and establishment of benchmarks. Participants will engage in discussions centered on identifying key stakeholders to involve and establishing cycles and timelines for each stage of the process. Challenges and recommendations for locating metrics and data related to areas common to specialized accreditors, such as faculty and staff, finances, student success, and admissions, will also be examined. Additionally, the presenters will provide an overview of basic statistical approaches that can be applied to analysis of assessment data as well as best practices in visualization and communication of assessment results. Session participants will receive examples from the presenters’ institutions, analyze case studies, and conclude the session with a brief period of guided working time to identify action steps for building or improving their program’s evaluation plan.
Mike Rudolph, Lincoln Memorial University School of Medical Sciences; Leslie Woltenberg, University of Kentucky College of Health Sciences; Justine S. Gortney, Wayne State University College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences; and Daniel Trujillo, Auburn University - Harrison College of Pharmacy
Presentation Type: Pre-Institute Workshop
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Accreditation
Leveraging EAC Blackboard's Assessment and Accreditation Solution for Computing Programs' Assessment and ABET Accreditation
As an Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology, Inc. (ABET) Coordinator for my institution and an ABET Program Evaluator, I observed many institutions struggle to meet the requirement of the Criterion 4: Continuous Improvement and ensure that the assessment results are fed back to the continuous improvement process used to assess Student Outcomes (SO) and Program Criterion. The goal of this presentation is to share the best practice experience gained from adopting the use of the Educational Assessments Corporation (EAC) Blackboard's Assessment and Accreditation Solution, which helps us to streamline our four computing programs’ assessment to not only meet the ABET requirements of continuous improvement but also to ensure student success.
Mostafa El-Said and Samah Mansour, Grand Valley State University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Accreditation
Navigating Turbulence and Nailing the Landing: Self-Study and Site Visit Advice for Assessment Coordinators
The process of writing a self-study is stressful enough, even before planning a virtual or in-person site visit! The presenters will describe how they organized and managed a collaborative self-study writing process using common office software, created legible data, hosted a virtual site visit, dealt with thorny situations, and kept their sense of humor intact. Although this presentation will be framed around a Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP) review, it will be applicable to a variety of professional/disciplinary accreditors. Participants will get practical advice for their own upcoming self-studies and site visits laced with some much-needed humor.
Erica Eckert and Andrew Palmer, Kent State University
Presentation Type: Poster Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Accreditation
Steps to Reaffirmation: A SACSCOC Journey to No Recommendations
Reaffirmation is a multi-year culmination of university stakeholders and processes coming together to ensure mission and vision achievement for student success. Claflin University engaged on the journey to reaffirmation in 2019, weathered a pandemic in 2020, and despite many challenges was able to earn reaccreditation without recommendation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges in December 2022. This presentation will outline the steps and methods used to engage the entire campus in the development of the compliance certificate and the Quality Enhancement Plan. Participants will learn transferable strategies and hear lessons learned from Claflin University to prepare their institution for a successful reaffirmation process.
Bridget Dewees, Claflin University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Advanced
Primary Track: Accreditation
The Opportunity of Accreditation: Motivation for Meaningful General Education Revision
With the Comprehensive Accreditation Evaluation on the horizon, Emmanuel College leveraged the opportunity to create meaningful revision of the General Education Program. Starting with a distribution model that was more than 20 years old, the College embarked on a three-year process to define new Institutional Learning Goals and develop a new General Education Program with intentionality and accountability. More than 150 courses have been reviewed and approved under the new Program, which includes embedded communication and critical thinking skills and diversity, multiculturalism, and social justice values. Course review included articulation of how the proposed course aligned with the learning outcomes of the General Education Program and through which assignment students would demonstrate their achievement of the outcome.
Bill Leonard and Cindy O'Callaghan, Emmanuel College
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Accreditation
Time and Data are Money: Maximizing Systems Data and Minimizing Time for Accreditation Preparation
Preparation for accreditation processes or program review can be time and data intensive, leaving faculty and administrators feeling stressed. Our goal is to provide solutions and describe how to effectively use existing data sources and systems platforms in an efficient manner to reduce workload and incorporate both short and long-term planning to meet accreditation or program review deadlines. With training and support, faculty can harness data from existing learning management systems, exam software, experiential and competency management systems, faculty data warehouses, and surveys in an organized manner to maximize reporting for stakeholders to evaluate and minimize cost to their program.
Justine S. Gortney and Sarah Agnihotri, Wayne State University-Eugene Applebaum College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Accreditation
Who’s the Author?: Considering the Use of ChatGPT in Accreditation Self-Studies
Institutional accreditation is a crucial component of ensuring quality education and maintaining compliance with established standards. However, the process of accreditation can be time-consuming and complex, involving the compilation and analysis of data, drafting reports, and communication with accreditation bodies. This presentation explores the potential use of ChatGPT, a natural language processing tool, to streamline the accreditation process. Specifically, we will discuss how ChatGPT can be used to assist with data analytics, report writing, and communication with accreditation bodies. We will provide examples of how ChatGPT can generate natural language summaries of data, identify areas for improvement, and provide accurate and concise responses to accreditation inquiries. We will also explore potential challenges and ethical considerations associated with the use of ChatGPT in accreditation. Overall, this presentation aims to demonstrate how ChatGPT can enhance the accreditation process, increase efficiency, and ultimately improve the quality of higher education.
Glenn Phillips, Watermark Insights
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Accreditation
A Comparative Analysis Process to Maximize Insights and Leverage Actions across Programs
The use of comparative analysis across Strayer University has enabled the academic leaders to share insights and actions that can be leveraged between programs. The measures of success of this process are to both improve student learning by implementing ideas and actions that have shown success, as well as further engage academic leaders and stakeholders in academic assessment conversations driven by data to further support students in the learning process. The internally designed process provides an alternative solution to the use of objective assessment to compare student learning across degree programs, particularly when students are accustomed to project based or rubric based assessment.
Dina Eagle and Stacy Sculthorp, Strayer University
Presentation Type: Poster Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Assessment in Online Courses & Programs
Educational Triage: Improving Student Engagement in the Online or Hybrid Learning Environment
Studies have shown that student engagement has had a positive impact on both persistence (retention and graduation) and, perhaps even more important, student learning. But, what is student engagement and how does one achieve it in the online or hybrid learning environment? This presentation will address both questions in detail. Over the past five years, we have examined the student experience to intentionally improve student engagement. We have done this through a process of “educational triage” from the course to the program to the institutional level. We will share our findings with the audience.
Andrea Funk, Brandy Price, and April Vincent, The Colleges of Law
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Assessment in Online Courses and Programs
Engaging Students in Assessment and Achievement of Learning Objectives in Semi-Synchronous Courses
Online teaching is challenged by verification of actual skills, even with high grades achievement. While learning objectives are clearly communicated at the beginning of the class and demonstrated in each lesson, it is challenging to equate the grades obtained in the assignments and attainment of learning objectives in an online environment. To assist this realization, we are proposing to conduct a pre- and post-survey of students’ learning outcomes awareness creation, assignment preparation, and skills verification. We foresee engaging the students in the learning objectives monitoring will improve their motivation to gain the skills designed per each course.
Zeyana Hamid and Saptarshi Purkayastha, IUPUI
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Assessment in Online Courses and Programs
Initial Validation of the Remote Learning Best Practices Inventory: A New Assessment of Online Course Quality
This presentation will review the initial validation work of the Remote Learning Best Practices Inventory (RLBP). This includes results from an exploratory principal components analysis using a sample of 495 community college students enrolled in general education courses. It also comprises the pattern of correlations between RLBP total scores and measures of course/academic success: overall GPA, course final grade, and course satisfaction. Findings are supportive of the RLBP’s construct validity as a unique assessment of online course quality. Results of a current analysis examining the relationships between RLBP and Quality Matters Rubric, 6th edition, scores will also be presented.
Heather P. Hatchett, Cincinnati State Technical and Community College
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Assessment in Online Courses and Programs
Moving Online: Accounting for Assessment Results to Transition and Improve a Professional Development Workshop
Many campuses turn to online modules to increase the availability and access of important knowledge necessary in the workplace. At the IU School of Medicine, faculty developers recently utilized assessment information to improve a popular faculty development initiative. The Upstander Intervention program hosted more than 28 cohorts of faculty, staff, and students through developing skills to address learner mistreatment in the moment. This session will highlight how assessment and evaluation processes informed the transition of the Upstander Intervention program to an online module and how early results from the online module are used to improve the quality of the module.
Emily Braught, Amy Ribera, Constance Skinner, and Alvaro Tori, Indiana University School of Medicine
Presentation Type: Poster Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Assessment in Online Courses and Programs
Navigating the Complexities of Assessing Learning Outcomes in Multi-Campus Collaborative Online Programs
The Office of Collaborative Academic Programs (OCAP) at Indiana University (IU) works with 48 collaborative online programs involving multiple IU campuses. Each campus has its own identity, culture, priorities, and practices – including assessment practices and processes. Additionally, most collaborative online programs have flexible curriculum, are adapted from in-person programs, and involve complex rotations of course offerings, making the assessment process very complicated. OCAP has developed standard processes to be implemented across programs and campuses. Balancing the diverging views and priorities of each campus involves negotiating, compromising, and developing consensus. Anticipating implementation obstacles has been essential to develop effective processes.
Allison K. Chatterjee, Indiana University Bloomington
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Assessment in Online Courses and Programs
Revamping, Blueprinting, and Assessing 'Anatomy and Physiology' I in Adult Education
At Galen College of Nursing, the COVID-19 pandemic forced all Arts & Science courses into the online modality. Post-pandemic, Galen decided the Arts & Science courses would remain predominantly online. We have spent the last year revamping our Anatomy & Physiology I course to ensure course consistency via multiple modalities (online, virtual, and on-ground). We began using formative assessments to assist students with retaining information, and we use summative assessment data to drive further modifications to enhance learning improvements and to evaluate mastery of Unit Student Learning Outcomes (USLOs).
Ellen B. Krumme, Ashley Davis-Anthony, and Shiloh Graham, Galen College of Nursing
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Assessment in Online Courses and Programs
Standardizing the Assessment Framework to Support Student Learning in Distance Education
This interactive session will present how Columbia Southern University (CSU), a 100% online university, has an assessment framework developed through an institution-wide process of standardization that directs the collaborative process among stakeholders in curriculum planning, course design, and assessment. Additionally, presenters demonstrate how this assessment framework leverages technology as its main infrastructure to collect, retrieve, and analyze student data within its distance learning format. Finally, presenters discuss how this approach, supported by CSU’s core values, proceeded with little disruption at the onset of and throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and maintained regular assessment practices during this time.
John T. Hope, Columbia Southern University; and Khalilah Burton, Bishop State Community College
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Assessment in Online Courses and Programs
A Simple Framework for Assessing Student Services and Administrative Units
This presentation will focus on a simple, stress-free framework to assess non-academic units to achieve continuous improvement. Participants will learn how to use commonly available data to improve their departments’ value-added functions. This presentation will center around a lecture of the simplified process, demonstration of the elements of the process (for a variety of student services and administrative functions), and hands-on work in defining each step of the process (with presenter feedback). Participants will also be provided with an editable version of an assessment manual, complete with templates for assessment planning and reporting.
Edward Hummingbird, Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute
Presentation Type: Pre-Institute Workshop
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Assessment Methods
Academic Program Assessment: The Nuts and Bolts
This workshop strategically focuses on the “nuts and bolts” to create an academic program-level assessment plan that is faculty-led and sustainable. The workshop will offer participants with best practices, tips and tricks, and structures to create elements of an assessment plan, including: (a) a mission statement, (b) program learning objectives, (c) curriculum mapping/learning opportunities, (d) means and methods for assessment, and (e) logistics for assessment (when, what, where, what, who, and how). This approach offers a scalable system for program-level assessment that can also help meet requirements for institutional and national accrediting agencies. It is intended to serve as a practical guide for program chairs, individual faculty members, or assessment professionals charged with implementing assessment for individual programs or at the campus level. Participants will walk away from the workshop with a clear rationale and charge for doing program-level assessment and with a feeling that program assessment is manageable and feasible.
Mark Nicholas, Framingham State University
Presentation Type: Pre-Institute Workshop
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Assessment Methods
An Alternative Model for Program Assessment in Community Colleges: Monitoring Students’ Annual Progress
The success of an academic program in community colleges is commonly defined by its graduation rate, transfer rate, or job placement rate. Because of the transient nature of community college students, the presenter emphasizes the importance of monitoring the academic progress of a panel instead of a cohort when assessing a program. Sharing three years’ enrollment data of an academic program, the presenter proposes to monitor students’ progress by a set percentage of courses in general education and the program core completed each academic year. The session ends with suggestions to prevent attrition and help raise the program’s graduation rate.
Julia W. So, The University of New Mexico-Valencia Campus
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Assessment Methods
Applying Indigenous Knowledge Systems for Equity-Centered Assessment
Equity-centered assessment practices is a popular topic today. To center equity in assessment practice, Indigenous knowledge systems (IKS) can be integrated to ground assessment in an ethos of equality and liberation. In this session, presenters will articulate the tenets and characteristics of IKS, describe the benefits of using IKS for assessment, and lead a discussion regarding ways to apply IKS to the assessment cycle. Participants will leave with concrete knowledge and applicable strategies and considerations non-Indigenous scholars must make to use in their own work.
Gavin Henning, New England College; and Anne E. Lundquist, The Hope Center, Temple University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Assessment Methods
Applying Mixed Methods to Campus Assessment and Program Evaluation
Professionals and scholars often engage mixed methods for conducting assessment, evaluations, and research for purposes of convergent discoveries or deeper explanations into phenomena. Yet many do not thoughtfully consider the underlying structures and philosophies between different methodologies and ways of constructing knowledge and how these affect their studies. This session will explore different approaches, designs, goals, and philosophies to conducting mixed methods research to strengthen participants' understanding of mixing methods to more effectively apply them to their work. Join us to discuss mixed methods and create a plan to incorporate them into your assessment and evaluation work.
Emily Braught, Indiana University School of Medicine; and Kevin Wenger, Indiana University Bloomington
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Assessment Methods
Are You New to Assessment Planning? Let’s Design an Assessment Plan Together
Are you new to assessment planning in your unit? Are you responsible for conducting assessment and want to make your assessment more meaningful and effective? Do you wish to design an assessment plan that can help faculty assess student achievement of program learning outcomes? If you have answered yes to any of these questions, then this session is for you. In this session we introduce you to what you need to know about assessment, questions you need to ask about assessment, how to prepare for assessment in a course, and how to design an assessment plan for an academic program.
Zeinab Amin, The American University in Cairo
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Assessment Methods
Assessing Students for Inclusive Post-Secondary Education Programs: Perspectives on Best Practices
Today there are more than 300 Inclusive Post-Secondary Education programs across the country. These programs focus on individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities, allowing them the opportunity to gain a college experience while simultaneously enhancing their academic skills, social interactions, and career development. One of the challenges of such programs is to effectively assess future success allowing for enhanced self-efficacy and self-awareness of the students as they progress through these academic programs. This brief workshop will discuss three years of collected data and trends used to identify successful program candidates and successful graduates.
Celia Scragg and Neil Duchac, Kennesaw State University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Assessment Methods
Assessment 101
Assessment. Where to start? It’s here in Assessment 101. Participants will interact with each other and engage in hands-on activities throughout this full-day workshop. You will grapple with questions fundamental to higher education such as: What should students know, think, and be able to do when they graduate? And, how would someone know if students succeeded? Fortunately, assessment can help us address these questions. Specifically, by the end of this workshop, you will be able to do the following: (1) explain the basic steps in the assessment process, (2) distinguish among beginning, developing, good, and advanced assessment reporting, (3) develop an assessment plan for one student learning outcome (SLO), and (4) discuss the fundamentals of applying interventions [e.g. pedagogy and curriculum] at the program level to improve student learning.
Keston H. Fulcher and Sarah Alahmadi, James Madison University
Presentation Type: Pre-Institute Workshop
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Assessment Methods
Assessment as Storytelling
In this session, we will consider and apply the skills of good storytelling to the assessment process. Assessment is informed by data, but data must be placed into a context. This context is the story we tell – a story of our students, faculty, and the social/cultural arrangements that bring them together. By letting data serve rather than obscure the story, we arrive at an engaging and more equitable assessment process.
Larry Frazier, University of North Texas at Dallas
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Assessment Methods
Calendar Prompts to Keep the Wheels of the Assessment Plan Moving
Assessment processes have a lot of moving parts that unfortunately do not move on their own. Assessment leadership, usually coordinators on most campuses, do what their title suggests and coordinate the assessment processes by helping to move the parts or directing others to move the parts. We decided that a task calendar would help our coordinators organize the many pieces and parts. We will share our task calendar and explain the pieces that keep the assessment plans moving along.
Julie Saam and Chanda Deaton, Indiana University Kokomo
Presentation Type: Poster Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Assessment Methods
Connected Assessment Management Ecosystem: Demonstrate Progress Toward Effectiveness with Anthology
Launching a successful institutional effectiveness plan is a complex endeavor. Your teams are faced with decisions around which data to collect, which technologies to use, and how to engage and communicate expectations to an institution-wide audience. In this session we will discuss how Anthology helps institutions get the data you need to tell your institution's story, and help you to answer that all-important question - are we fulfilling our mission and commitment to our learners?
Jenna Ralicki and Brandon Loy, Anthology
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Sponsor Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Assessment Methods
Developing A Tailor-Made Assessment Tool
This presentation will outline the development of an assessment tool designed to measure student learning around our college's general education goal of Inquiry and Analysis. Departing from the past practice of collecting student artifacts via coursework, the committee decided that we could tailor-design an assessment tool specific to our student body, our community, and our student learning outcomes. Participants will engage in a dialogue around the benefits of developing assessment tools for general education assessment purposes.
Jennifer Asimow, Andrew Kerr, and Brandon Bumstead, Harry S Truman College
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Assessment Methods
Effect of COVID-19-Based Closures on Workforce Development Program Assessments
Early research on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic suggest closures had a negative impact on learning in both K-12 and higher education. Though most education and training programs adopted online learning during closures, online learning may have been less effective at teaching curriculum that required hands-on practice. We examine the effect of COVID-19 closures on learners’ performance on a large-scale assessment in a workforce development program. Our results, which are consistent with past research, show that online learning, especially during the pandemic, may have been less effective for certain training content.
Abena Anyidoho, Rebecca Berenbon, Young-Min Kim, and Bridget McHugh, The Ohio State University
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Assessment Methods
Enhance Institutional Excellence with Insights for Canvas Outcomes
Institutions continuously seek ways to drive student success initiatives and achieve excellence. While Canvas Outcomes allows tracking outcome mastery, adding Insights allows your institution to retain longitudinal data and develop a deeper understanding of student performance by leveraging assessment planning and advanced data analytics. This session reviews how institutions may use Insights for Canvas Outcomes to engage its community around outcomes assessment, align outcomes to accreditation standards, and improve the institution’s ability to drive meaningful change. This session is designed for educators, administrators, and assessment experts looking to use Canvas Learning Management System (LMS) outcome data for institutional planning and improvement efforts.
Shelby Johnson, eLumen
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Sponsor Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Assessment Methods
Enhancing Students’ Learning Outcomes through the 2F3C Model
The 2F3C framework is a pedagogical, heutagogical, and relational teaching and learning paradigm referring to five crucial decision points of course design and implementation: focused, flexible, connected, committed, and consistent. The institution implemented this innovation in response to the challenges, especially in assessment in higher education during the post-pandemic. This study used the phenomenological qualitative research design in describing the lived experiences of the classes who experienced the 2F3C Teaching and Learning Framework. The results show that the 2F3C Model has a highly positive impact on students and has enhanced learning outcomes.
Daniel S. Lerongan, Maria Theresa Markines, and Jovelyn G. Delosa, Northern Bukidnon State College
Presentation Type: Poster Session
Audience Level: Advanced
Primary Track: Assessment Methods
Ensuring Program Health through Data-Driven, Collaborative Academic Program Review (APR) Processes
Want to make academic program review a truly meaningful process that fosters equity and continuous improvement? This presentation will outline how our institution revised its Academic Program Review process to focus on supporting academic programs through engagement with disaggregated program health metrics and via a clear process for closing the loop. Supporting department chairs in their data and assessment scholarship and engaging the help of an Interdisciplinary Assessment Council are the cornerstones of our efforts to ensure our academic programs get the help they need to be sustainable into the future.
Veena Dhankher and Kris Ricker Choleva, Holyoke Community College
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Assessment Methods
Examining GPA and Praxis Outcomes for Elementary Education Majors
Aspiring elementary teachers must demonstrate their content knowledge through licensing exams and grade point average (GPA) to universities and licensing boards to pursue their dream. How well do these measures correlate with each other? Or, asked differently, can GPA predict success on a content-based licensing exam? This presentation examines how Praxis outcomes—which the Indiana Department of Education recently adopted as its standardized test of teacher content knowledge—relate to course grades in a regional, public university. The findings suggest that overall GPA is not well-aligned to exam outcomes, but grades in specific content areas may predict success on the exams.
Michael Flory, Purdue University Fort Wayne
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Assessment Methods
Four Acts for Equity-Centered Assessment
Among the many models that have been offered to define, situate, and execute assessment in a way that advances equity work, none have showcased how core components of good assessment practice can be practically applied through specific acts to leverage assessment for equity. Presenters will share core aspects of equity-centered assessment (ECA) and four concrete examples for incorporating ECA in everyday assessment practice. Audience members will have the chance to actively engage to discuss their experiences with ECA, learn about four acts for ECA, choose, and reflect on an act to implement at their home organization.
Ciji A. Heiser, Developing Capacity Coaching, LLC; and Joseph D. Levy, Excelsior University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Assessment Methods
Getting Academic Program Reviews on Track: How our Academic Assessment Team Made It Happen
The program review process requires a lot of coordination and access to data. This session will describe how the Academic Assessment Team developed a process to administratively support Program Reviews (PRs) while providing a safe space for faculty to analyze their data, determine next steps based on patterns in the data, and make informed decisions. Taking part in this session will provide attendees with a tangible framework for supporting the academic program review process at their institution. Presenters will share specific tools developed to schedule PRs, support their completion (e.g., narrative templates, data table examples, and suggested trend analysis), and facilitate follow-up.
Elizabeth A. Mosser Knight, Alison Amato, and Ann DeLawder, Hartford Community College
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Assessment Methods
Grades and Learning
This session encourages readers to reconsider the value of course grades by reviewing various ways that grades can be used to estimate student abilities and course difficulties, and link those to discipline-specific learning. Relevant literature shows the link between grades, graduation rates, and learning. Practical takeaways include a model of learning that includes both grades and rubric ratings that helps identify learning gaps.
David Eubanks, Furman University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Assessment Methods/Learning Improvement
Grand Challenges in Assessment: Approaches to Authentically Measuring Student Learning in Settings across Campus
This session will be focused on demonstrating the use, creation, and evaluation of tactics that participants can use in the space of their own campus, classroom, or campus office. We intend to engage the audience in a discussion of the process of developing assessments across different contexts: formative assessment, multiple-choice exam questions, co-curricular learning, and experiential learning. Presenters will then share examples of how learning is measured in each context and will guide the participants in a discussion of evaluating the example provided to highlight the assessment design process for ensuring a strong approach to authentically measuring student learning.
Jessica Taylor, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga; Chadia N. Abras and Bri Lauka, Johns Hopkins University; Suzanne Carbonaro, HelioCampus; and Rene' Schmauder, Clemson University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Assessment Methods
HIPs: The Building Blocks of Successful Programming
What does it take to build a successful academic program? Vision, goals, strategy, management, challenges, teamwork, motivation, and leadership. We invite you to come listen to three notable leaders (program directors) detail the significance of incorporating HIPs into three highly successful, distinct programs at Middle Tennessee State University: The Experiential Learning Scholars Program, the interdisciplinary Master of Arts in Liberal Arts Program, and the Commercial Songwriting undergraduate program.
Janet McCormick, Carol Swayze, and Odie Blackmon, Middle Tennessee State University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Assessment Methods/HIPs in the States (High-Impact Practices)
Hitting Pause: What We Learned During a Year of Assessment Reflection and Planning
During the 2022-2023 academic year, Washington & Jefferson College embedded a reflection and planning period into our assessment process. Instead of conducting and reporting on departmental, unit, and general education assessment, we spent a year examining what assessment means across all areas of the college, how we have conducted assessment in the past, what is working well, and what could be reimagined. The goals were to advance an inclusive assessment plan consistent with the college’s mission and culture of teaching and learning and to innovate and improve assessment in efficient, collaborative, and meaningful ways with available time, expertise, and resources.
Rebecca L. McDonald, Ronalee Ciocco, and Theresa Ford, Washington & Jefferson College
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Assessment Methods
Igniting a Positive Culture of Curricular Assessment
This presentation will showcase how Lincoln Land Community College created a simple, transparent, and user-friendly app titled CourseTalk+. Faculty are engaged in data-driven discussions about opportunities within student learning. Learning assessment narratives become the catalyst for curricular change while connecting to our strategic plan.
Matthew Shaver and Adam Watkins, Lincoln Land Community College
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Assessment Methods
Implementing A Campus-Wide Four-Year Career Action Plan with Carthage College
Please join us as we discuss how The Aspire Program at Carthage is improving career readiness with the implementation of My Aspire Plan (MAP). MAP utilizes Suitable's web and mobile platform to assist students in developing skills in entrepreneurship, leadership, creativity, and career development. MAP is an integrated 4-year career and life navigation tool. MAP tracks student progress through The Aspire Program and articulates the meaning of on- and off-campus experiences. This session will provide: (1) an overview of MAP and its nine competencies; (2) a look at how MAP embeds career readiness into the Carthage student experience; (3) a year-by-year review of how students complete MAP; (4) a quick walkthrough of key Suitable capabilities; and (5) a live Q&A with presenters.
Laura Naylor, Suitable; Mandy Long and Stephanie Stover, Carthage College
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Sponsor Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Assessment Methods
Institutional Effectiveness Defined through Internal Student Survey
An institutional stakeholder survey can serve to solidify the voluntary, peer-reviewed process of accreditation from the Liaison Committee for Medical Education (LCME). In addition to ensuring that a historically Black graduate institution (HBGI) is meeting and exceeding its vision and mission to the stakeholders its serves, the same instrument can be used to determine if the administration and student services are achieving satisfaction levels for its learners. This proposed poster presentation examines the institutional effectiveness of the various academic departments and resources available to medical students that make up the HBGI.
Dawn Felton, Morehouse School of Medicine
Presentation Type: Poster Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Assessment Methods
Launching a Character-Based Education and Assessment Program at Your Campus
Despite its popularity, strengths-based education has failed to help campuses improve student outcomes and has several flaws. In this session, presenters make a case for campuses to replace a strengths-based education with character-based education, which provides students with a nuance and contextual understanding of who they are and how they fit in the campus community. The presenters will introduce a new tool to measure Character Skills for campuses interested in launching a character-based education program.
Shalin J. Shah, Character Arc
Presentation Type: Poster Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Assessment Methods
Leveling Up Your Assessment Skills
If you are interested in advancing your assessment skills, come to our session and learn about James Madison University’s weeklong Assessment 101 workshop. Through this award-winning professional development, you can engage with every step of the assessment process from articulating student learning outcomes to using results for improvement. The experience is led by assessment experts in the Center for Assessment and Research Studies.
Keston Fulcher, Sara Finney, and John Hathcoat, James Madison University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Sponsor Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Assessment Methods
Lifelong CN ePortfolio: A Powerful Tool for Assessment and Personal Branding
This presentation will present the CN ePortfolio (thecn.com/ePortfolio) as an impactful tool for assessment and student personal branding. Through captivating examples and real-world use cases, the CN and IUPUI CyberLab team will showcase how this dynamic social and lifelong ePortfolio platform has facilitated student growth. Attendees will discover how various courses and programs have successfully integrated this tool to revolutionize student learning assessment and competency evaluation. Furthermore, institutional leaders will gain insights into how this platform can act as a catalyst for transformative change within their curriculum, fostering student engagement and enhancing career preparation. This presentation aims to provide valuable information to individual faculty members, program administrators, and institutional leaders seeking innovative approaches and tools to assess students, while nurturing their personal and academic development. Join us for this engaging session that will explore the potential of CN ePortfolio and inspire attendees to reimagine student assessment and promote their overall success.
Ali Jafari, Alice Zhao, and Jue Wang, CourseNetworking
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Sponsor Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Assessment Methods
Moving Toward a Simplified and Efficient College-Wide Student Learning Outcomes Assessment Process
This presentation will describe a college-wide student learning outcomes assessment model that was implemented as a three-year pilot project at Westchester Community College. Institutional Learning Outcomes were assessed and mapped to the State University of New York’s General Education Student Learning Outcomes. The assessment was led by faculty members of the Faculty Senate Assessment Committee, and faculty across the College were asked to submit assessment data via an online form. Faculty participation rates were low but increased the last year of the pilot. Strategies for increasing faculty participation and institutionalizing a continual student learning outcomes assessment process will be discussed.
Kamil G. Hamaoui, Westchester Community College
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Assessment Methods
Peer Tutoring: If Done Well, Could It Be a High-Impact Practice?
Might peer tutoring qualify as a high-impact practice? This session features the results of the first multi-institution study of the effects of peer tutoring on tutors and students receiving tutoring. The presenters draw on data from the National Survey of Student Engagement including a set of experimental questions specifically designed to interrogate the peer tutoring experience. They also discuss what it would take to consistently deliver peer tutoring with the qualities of a HIP.
Jim Cole, Jillian Kinzie, and George Kuh, Indiana University Bloomington; Page Keller, Austin Doyle, and Samyr Qureshi, Knack; and Dawna Perez, University of New Hampshire
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Assessment Methods/HIPs in the States (High-Impact Practices)
Silly Rubrics: A Creativity-Generator and Tool for Writing Descriptive Rubrics
Descriptive rubrics (also known as analytic rubrics) are the “gold standard” for assessment, but they can be challenging to create. One way to make rubric-writing less intimidating is to make it personal. Very personal. For a decade, the presenter has used a hands-on activity to take the fear out of rubric-writing, called the “silly rubric.” In this session, participants will create a silly rubric and discuss how the activity can translate to the writing of more serious rubrics. Participants will leave the presentation feeling more confident in their skills and be ready to perform this amusing activity with others.
Erica Eckert, Kent State University
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Assessment Methods
Taking Stock and Building Rapport: Key Ingredients in Strengthening the Culture for Meaningful Assessment of Student Learning
Assessment professionals come from a variety of backgrounds and are essentially charged with the responsibility of building/strengthening an infrastructure that produces documented evidence of student learning. While there are varying perspectives associated with the work that happens in this space (i.e., hard work, extra work, does not work…) “taking stock” and “building rapport” are important first steps in building/strengthening and operationalizing a framework for assessment that produces actionable insights that lead to improvements in student learning. Come journey with the presenter as he shares his experiences navigating what some describe as an uphill accountability-driven battle.
Franz Reneau, Georgia Tech
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Assessment Methods/Learning Improvements
The Anatomy of a System for the Assessment of Academic Support and Student Support Services
The assessment of support services units for the purpose of continuous quality improvement is not only required by most institutional and program accreditors, but this assessment is central to the effective operation of any institution of higher learning. Session participants will learn how Morehouse School of Medicine (MSM) has implemented a system of assessment that ensures that its support programs and services ensure the success and well-being of its students in alignment with MSM's mission and institutional priorities.
Constance Garnes and Mark Howse, Morehouse School of Medicine
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Assessment Methods
The Essential Role of Developing Researchers in Assessment: Lessons from the Lab
In assessment we share the goal of advancing students’ learning, but who develops assessment professionals? The Research Design Studio at Ball State University is a studio-based lab that brings together the expertise of faculty and advanced graduate students to support the development of institutional research professionals. Using a vertical mentorship model, the RDS creates a learning community where both faculty members and doctoral students at various stages with differing expertise provide peer mentoring to newer team members. Presenters will provide an authentic look at the skills developed in program consultation, evaluation, and establishing high-quality research design.
Robyn Fisher, Danielle Davis, and Alishia Hazelwood, Ball State University
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Assessment Methods
The Role of Performance-Based Assessment in the New Normal Classroom
The study answered the question on how students perceived the characteristics of a performance task. The study utilized the structural equation modeling which produced a model indicating that characteristics of a performance task are a strong predictor of students’ performance. It explored how these criteria can be utilized in the new normal setting. Results showed that a performance task must fulfill these characteristics: congruence to class activities, authenticity, and clarity of rubrics. Teachers have to decide on the frequency of performance tasks, weights, rigor, and accommodations given to students who are affected by issues of access to resources.
Jovelyn G. Delosa and Janneth Ong, Northern Bukidnon State College
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Assessment Methods
Using Data Visualization to Align Course Learning Outcomes and Program Learning Outcomes
Health Administration is a new bachelor’s program at Western Michigan University (WMU) developed utilizing existing courses and designed to meet certification standards under Association of University Programs in Health Administration (AUPHA). As part of certification, programs must define and measure program goals and outcomes. Since the program was designed to address content areas rather than program outcomes, how and where these outcomes were addressed and the extent to which they were assessed was unknown. To fill this gap, data visualization tools were created to map course learning outcomes to program outcomes, measure the cognitive levels assessed in each course using Bloom’s taxonomy, and communicate this information with faculty and students.
Jessica Cataldo, Western Michigan University
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Assessment Methods
X Marks the Spot: Leveraging Mapping for Curriculum and Assessment
Most programs (degree and co-curricular) have many moving parts. Academic programs have numerous courses. Co-curricular programs have many potential iterations. All bring value to the student learning experience. Mapping is an indispensable tool that ensures programs are structured efficiently, outcomes are addressed, and assessments align appropriately. In this presentation, the presenter(s) will provide an interactive and collaborative approach that can be used for curriculum mapping or assessment mapping. Mapping is a great exercise—but can uncover some surprises. Examples of and advice for potentially awkward conversations will be provided.
Erica Eckert, Kent State University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Assessment Methods
Effective Practices and Challenges in Succession Planning in Health Sciences Education through Academic Leaders’ Perspectives
To investigate successful practices and challenges for succession planning in health sciences education within the United States, a multiple case study was applied as 10 respondents underwent a pre-interview questionnaire, a structured interview, and a post-interview debrief. Respondents discussed talent development, performance, potential, and internal talent. Three themes for useful practices included leadership infrastructure (84.97%), engagement (11.27%), and nurturing internal applicants (3.76%). Four challenge themes included retention gaps (27.38%), unclear communication (47.62%), unclear roles (8.33%), and lack of intentionality (16.67%). Gaps remained in operationalizing strategies, developing consistency, and educating leaders on talent development in recruiting, hiring, and promoting internal talent.
David Fuentes, University of Portland
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Campus Business Operations and Services
From Small Private to Large Public System: The Acquisition of Martin Methodist College by the University of Tennessee System
This panel explores the process by which the public University of Tennessee System acquired Martin Methodist College, a 150+-year-old Methodist-related institution, which is now the University of Tennessee Southern. The process has covered pretty much the full range of higher education and assessment issues: politics, public and alumni relations, communication, finances, curriculum, faculty and staffing, institutional effectiveness, and accreditation. The panel will review the process from its origin through the development of support from state and local governments, the development of support internally at both institutions and with alumni, the review and approval by state and regional (SACSCOC) accrediting agencies, and the adjustments required to curricular, financial, and other operational procedures.
Judy Cheatham, Linda Martin, Robby Shelton, and George Cheatham, University of Tennessee Southern
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Campus Business Operations and Services
All Together Now: Synchronizing Institutional Assessment and Planning
Accredited through the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities (NWCCU), Chemeketa Community College is required to engage in systematic continuous improvement to refine its effectiveness. Looking to update our assessment and planning processes, in Fall 2022 I interviewed strategic planners at six Aspen Institute-honored community colleges and reviewed scholarship exploring principles of effective evaluation. My theory of change: an effective continuous improvement process positions a college to excel in helping its students complete credentials and achieve living wages. Themes I discovered in my research guided our redesign for a more synchronized, focused approach to assessment and planning.
Mary Ellen M. Scofield, Chemeketa Community College
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Community Colleges
An Assessment Committee “Reboot:” Finding a New Path Toward Meaningful Assessment
A crucial role of a college-wide general education assessment committee is to bring order and guidance to an otherwise vast process. The faculty and administration from one small urban community college managed to “reboot” their process from one that was bogged down in details to one that is motivated and committed to collaborative and meaningful assessment practices. This session will share the steps through which this committee renewed their focus and found a new path toward assessment.
Brandie Windham, Celeste Sonnier, and Ryan Tomchek, Morton College
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Community Colleges
Assessment of General Education Learning Outcomes at a Community College
Delta College has developed an integrated general education model which is embedded in all degrees, instead of the traditional distributed model. We use embedded assignments to collect data and a common rubric for scoring. We will focus this presentation on sharing details of our assessment methods including student and course selection, types of assignments, and methods for scoring artifacts. We will share results and lessons learned related to some of our six general education outcomes. Lastly, this session will address common problems and share solutions that have been implemented to create a sustainable faculty-led college-wide assessment plan.
Eric Wiesenauer, Casey Armour, Mark Balawender, and Carla Murphy, Delta College
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Community Colleges
Assessment Practices of General Education Outcomes by Embedding Contextually within Associate Degree Programs
This session highlights the recent assessment practices that Jackson College has implemented by embedding their general education outcomes contextually at the associate degree program level for the past five years. Using this methodology, degree programs are better able to reinforce proficiency and gather meaningful insight on how students are meeting the outcomes at the end of their program.
Christie Hughes, Allison Price, Todd Butler, Curt Blankespoor, and Clevester Moten, Jackson College
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Community Colleges
Designing and Maintaining a Well-Functioning Academic Program Advisory Board
The purpose of an academic advisory board is to create a mechanism through which academic program representatives, typically faculty and program coordinators, and/or department chairs, maintain consistent connection with representatives within the business field(s) associated with the academic program. The primary focus of an academic program advisory board is one of assessment. It provides feedback and direction to college representatives and assists in ensuring students within the identified program(s) are best prepared to successfully enter and succeed in their chosen career field. This presentation addresses how to create and utilize such a group of community professionals.
Penny Quinn, Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Community Colleges
House on Fire to Culture of Improvement: How a SACSCOC Finding Helped Move Assessment Forward at One Community College
In 2017, Pellissippi State Community College was put “on monitoring” by SACSCOC for its lack of effective assessment of programs. As a result, it was required to quickly create processes for assessing individual courses in both the General Education and University Parallel categories. The urgent “house on fire” approach to assessing all courses according to defined outcomes laid a foundation by which instructors could evaluate student success. Despite significant gains over the last few years, we are now working to develop a more efficient and sustainable culture of improvement that utilizes the expertise of its faculty to ensure student success.
Amy N. Tankersley, Spencer Christensen, and Jesse Cragwall, Pellissippi State Community College
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Community Colleges
The Importance of Shared Governance in Institutional Culture and Success of Outcomes Assessment
This session examines the significance of establishing and maintaining shared governance in higher education institutions. As demonstrated through the experience of one community college, shared governance can directly impact institutional culture and the success of outcomes assessment practices. An overview of how the college implemented effective assessment processes, faculty-driven committee structures, and positively influenced the culture will be shared. This session will present practical tips for faculty, outcomes assessment staff, and administrative leadership.
Ashley Becker, Stephanie Klie, Melissa Rossi, and Michelle Wessel, Southwestern Illinois College
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Community Colleges
Thinking Critically About Critical Thinking Assessment
Lui, Frankel, and Roohr (2014) highlighted the definitional and operational challenges of critical thinking assessment. How one conceptualizes critical thinking – as a generalist skill or domain-specific skill – determines how one goes about defining it and assessing it. In this session, participants will (a) reflect on their institution’s approach to critical thinking assessment, (b) hear how one community college pivoted from a generalist to a domain-specific orientation in assessment of critical thinking, (c) share how their institution conceptualizes, defines, and assesses critical thinking, and (d) explore equitable approaches to critical thinking assessment which go beyond traditional assessments.
Jennifer Billman, HACC, Central Pennsylvania's Community College
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Community Colleges
Utilizing Authentic Leadership to Impact Student Success in Gateway Courses
Attendees will explore how authentic leadership (AL) has direct and indirect impacts on student success in gateway courses. We will discuss the components of AL as a leadership approach to influence, train, and develop faculty in the implementation of effective andragogy, embedding social justice concepts in gateway courses, and improving equitable assessment practices. Presenters will deliver a dynamic presentation with a question-and-answer session.
Amber R. Ruszkowski, Ivy Tech Community College; and Karen White-Goyzueta, C4REL Consulting, LLC
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Community Colleges
Competency-Based Coach Curriculum and Assessing for Medical Student Utility
Academic coaching curriculum aims to support students' self-regulation, boost academic and clinical competencies, and leverage a life-long learning mindset. Despite curricular popularity, less is understood about initial launching efforts that inform curricular changes from undergraduate student experiences to the exposure of coaching and building individualized learning plans. To minimize this gap, a mixed methodological data analysis was performed pre- and post-program to unveil changes within student experiences to the program. Potential impact is determined in the data results and informs the importance of flexibility to adjust the curriculum to align institutional goals with student pace.
Rebecca Lustfield, University of South Dakota Sanford School of Medicine
Presentation Type: Poster Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Competency-Based Education and Assessment
From the Bottom Up: Grounding Assessment Practice in Workforce-Relevant Skills
It’s time to create your assessment—where do you begin? How do you determine what is worthy of assessing, and what is peripheral? At WGU, the answer to this (and many other questions) lies with articulating the skills necessary for students to succeed not only in the academic context but the workplace. Come to this session to learn more about our skills-denominated approach to designing competencies and assessments. Additionally, we will share open resources available to help other institutions adopt a skills-based approach.
Laura M. Williams and Samantha Coen, Western Governors University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Competency-Based Education and Assessment
Hallmark Practices in Competency-Based Education Assessment
In competency-based education (CBE) programs, learners progress as they demonstrate competence using rigorous assessments that are performance-based, criterion-referenced, and authentic. Mastery or proficiency at the program level is the goal for every learner, requiring differentiated learning and assessments. To establish the quality of these assessments, the Competency-Based Education Network (C-BEN) Quality Framework for CBE Programs outlines standards, and the Hallmark Practices in CBE Assessment supports implementation. This session will review the role of assessment in CBE programs, including an overview of hallmark practices, sharing examples of both formative and summative assessments at the competency and program level. Additionally, insights will be provided on supporting faculty and instructional teams to facilitate equitable assessments across the program.
Tiffany Freeze and Amber Garrison Duncan, Competency-Based Education Network (C-BEN); and Laurie Dodge, University of Massachusetts Global
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Competency-Based Education and Assessment
How Six Institutional Competencies Came to Be: A Creation Story
Critical Thinking. Analytical Thinking. Communication. Social Responsibility. Leadership. Innovation. This session will describe the University of Georgia’s quest to institutionalize six competencies, or shared learning goals, for all undergraduate students. Presenters will share relatable assessment design goals and learning outcomes mapping schema, and foreshadow the implementation of a comprehensive learner record. This story is not without conflict between main characters and plot twists in university governance, but the narrative arc contains enduring themes of students’ world readiness, willing faculty partners, successful collaboration, and supportive leadership. Attendees will enjoy opportunities to engage and consider their own campus contexts.
Katherine Burr, University of Georgia
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Competency-Based Education and Assessment
Leverage the Learning Management System (LMS) to Report Assessment
Increased focus on assessment at Idaho State University has revealed a need for additional reporting and analysis tools at our institution. To address accreditation needs, we worked collaboratively with faculty and programs to develop Moodle competency frameworks and attach them to signature assessments within courses. We will discuss strengths of the current systems and our efforts to augment the reporting and analysis to improve program efficiency, course evaluation, and student self-assessment. Further, we will showcase our custom configurable reports and participants will use open-source tools to create visualizations from simulated data.
Sacha Johnson, Max Maccluer, Ryan Randall, Michael Spall, Randy Stamm, and Kimberly Tomkinson, Idaho State University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Competency-Based Education and Assessment
Leveraging Assessment to Create Educational and Career Pathways for the Early Childhood Education Workforce in Illinois
Illinois is successfully leveraging a statewide competency-based assessment system for Prior Learning Assessment (PLA), awarding up to 12 credit hours toward an entry-level Early Childhood Education credential. Through this statewide initiative, Illinois is assessing and mapping competencies to college courses and credit hours, opening new pathways to college; especially for students with full lives that cannot access traditional academic programs - the majority of whom are women, low-income, and Black and/or Latino. Session participants will learn how a statewide virtual reality assessment platform is creating pathways and gain insights into the critical role of competencies and assessment to ensure equitable education outcomes.
Tiffany Freeze, Competency-Based Education Network (C-BEN); and Johnna Darragh Ernst, Heartland Community College
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Advanced
Primary Track: Competency-Based Education and Assessment
Whipping Up Assessment to a Tastier Outcome: Exploring Competency-Based Assessment through a Culinary Lens
This presentation will examine through interactive audience participation a culinary-focused demonstration of how the Culinary Institute of America deploys competency-based assessment in kitchen laboratory courses using an innovative standardized rubric that is flexible and broadly applicable to all levels of our undergraduate culinary education.
Matthew Ruane and Cynthia Keller, Culinary Institute of America
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Competency-Based Education and Assessment
Advancing Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB) Means What Exactly? A Pragmatic Approach to DEIB Assessment
If an organization says it values Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging, then it needs to measure Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB). However, understanding what to measure and then successfully doing so across a multifaceted organization is not an easy feat. This session will highlight an approach toward establishing baseline DEIB reporting, examples of institutional complexities surrounding DEIB evaluation, the creation and utilization of multiple data sources, and how resulting data were shared with institutional partners.
Steve Chichester and Rachel Heverly, Penn State University
Presentation Type: Poster Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Assessing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in Written Communication: Antiracist Frameworks for Program-Wide Assessment
This session will explore how antiracist assessment frameworks can impact assessment practices across multiple axes, looking specifically at assessing for diversity, equity, and inclusion in student work products when DEI is a held value but not a targeted learning outcome. We will share a large-scale assessment project on Written Communication general education learning outcomes that used antiracist writing assessment practices to center DEI, tracing the work from the creation of assessment rubrics to data collection and analysis to reporting the findings and finally to creating curricular change. Participants will develop a heuristic for using antiracist frameworks at their home institutions.
Stephanie Hedge, University of Illinois Springfield
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Becoming an Anti-Racist Campus: The Case of IUPUI Anti-Racist Reading Groups
In response to the death of George Floyd and the subsequent protests against police brutality and the deaths of Black people at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the IUPUI campus leadership implemented a set of anti-racist initiatives. Among them, the anti-racist reading group professional development program for faculty and staff. During this session, the presenters will provide a roadmap to establish an anti-racist reading group program and develop an assessment plan to evaluate this program.
Sonia Ninon and Jamie Royce, IUPUI
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Coaching and Diversity Climate Surveys: Leading Departments through an Equity-Minded Administration
Assessment strategies are only as valuable as the conversations they create. Faculty developers at the IU School of Medicine understood that to see transformative change; organizational climate surveys could not occur without meaningful engagement with the results. This session will overview how the presenters utilized a coaching model, critical quantitative review strategies, and organizational change theory to coach departments through the survey administration, analysis, and results sharing processes of localized administrations of the Diversity Engagement Survey. Presenters will share lessons learned and evidence of action that other leaders in assessment can utilize in their own climate survey administrations.
Amy Ribera, Emily Braught, and Megan Palmer, Indiana University School of Medicine; and Christen Priddie, Indiana University Bloomington
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Course-Level Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity Efforts in High-Impact Practice (HIP) Courses: What Can Faculty Reflections Teach Us?
To make college equitable and inclusive of all students, faculty, and staff, we need to change university practices and policies at all levels and in all programs on our campuses. For three years, our university has asked faculty assessing their high-impact courses to reflect on what they’ve done to make their courses diverse, equitable, and inclusive. Analysis of these reflections reveals how faculty understand and conceptualize DEI, what faculty value, and suggest future directions for faculty development.
Jackie Grutsch McKinney, Carole Kacius, and Kristen McCauliff, Ball State University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Curriculum Mapping in Course Transformation Initiatives of Diverse Cultures Seminars
To increase student learning opportunities for developing intercultural knowledge and competence, we created initiatives to examine courses that address the University’s General Education learning outcome of Understanding Diverse Cultures. These initiatives include (1) initial assessment of content and assignments to determine how criteria for intercultural knowledge and competence are being addressed, (2) identification of and discussion with faculty about resources that support learning opportunities, and (3) adjustment of course content (readings, assignments, and/or activities) for areas needing improvement. This session will share the initial assessments involving a curriculum mapping process. Effectiveness and challenges will be discussed using example cases.
Lynda D. Nyce, Juliet K. Hurtig, and Eunhee Kim, Ohio Northern University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Disaggregating Marketable Skill Data to Identify Equity Gaps in Diverse Student Populations
Equitable collection, analysis, and access to data are critical to improving student outcomes. San Antonio College assesses student learning outcomes in each course section, every semester, for every student. The college disaggregates institutional student outcomes to identify and address specific student needs for equitable achievement. This discussion will focus on institutional leadership commitment and transforming institutional assessment practices from measuring Student Learning Outcomes for compliance, to engaging students and faculty in the acquisition of marketable skills to reduce equity gaps and improve institutional student outcomes.
Rosalind K. Ong and Francisco Solis, San Antonio College
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Diversity Statements: Prompt and Rubric Revision for Faculty and Staff Recruitment
With the goal of recruiting stronger equity-minded employees more reliably, Bellevue College is revising the rubric and prompt for commitment to diversity statements submitted with employment applications to the college. After reviewing prompts and rubrics from other institutions, we identified four criteria for evaluating the quality of the statements, then created a rubric to measure those criteria and a prompt designed to communicate the criteria to applicants. The rubric and prompt are being piloted to test ease of understanding and reliability of measurement, which will inform their final revision and adoption.
Zachary Morgan, Elizabeth Harazim, Abner Pagunuran, and Jennifer Pang, Bellevue College
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Faculty-Engaged Assessment of a College Program for Marginalized Students
Providing students with supportive services on campus assumes that (i) students will utilize the services and (ii) support on campus is preferable to that outside the university. There are many reasons why students do not embrace the services offered on campus. Universities that continue to bolster institutional services can overlook informal networks of support beneficial for first-generation and many other marginalized students. This qualitative study engages faculty to assess a college program at a midwestern regional university. The purpose of this research is to improve programming for marginalized students at a predominantly white institution (PWI) through faculty-engaged program assessment.
John Girdwood, University of Michigan-Flint
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Gathering and Using Student Basic Needs Data to Center Equity and Student Success
Basic needs security (food, housing, transportation, mental health, safety, digital access, childcare, and more) is central to learning and is critical for student success, persistence and degree completion, and advancing equity. The Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice at Temple University will share how institutions address basic needs insecurity through application of research-based interventions, thoughtful practice, and social justice. This session will review a summary of findings from the most recent national survey on student basic needs security and share examples of how colleges are taking action with their data to transform campus policies and programs.
Anne E. Lundquist, The Hope Center, Temple University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Increasing Equity in the Assessment of Student Learning
The Grand Challenges in Assessment project is working to increase the equity of assessments in higher education. A key part of this work is finding more accurate and fair ways to measure learning. Assignment features can support or prevent equity in higher education. Students' work on assignments influences the extent to which they learn important concepts. Grades and feedback influence their success and feelings about the extent to which they belong in institutions or majors. In this workshop, we will discuss features of assignments that perpetuate equity gaps and interfere with students' ability to demonstrate proficiency. We will provide a range of simple ways that assessments can be improved to increase equity and support student success. We will conclude with a discussion of ways to engage others in working to improve the equity of their measures of student learning.
Karen E. Singer-Freeman, Wake Forest University; and Christine Robinson, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Presentation Type: Pre-Institute Workshop
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Pell Grant Reinstatement Is Here: How Accreditors, Peer Reviewers, and Colleges Can Better Assess College-In-Prison Programs
Pell Grant reinstatement began on July 1, 2023. Pell reinstatement expands opportunities for people serving a criminal conviction in prison, jails, and juvenile facilities by allowing them to access federal Pell Grants for the first time in 26 years. Assessing the quality of programming in correctional settings during the Department of Education’s Second Chance Pell Experiment was a challenge for many institutional and correctional accreditors. This presentation will spotlight best practices and quality indicators accreditors (college and corrections) and peer reviewers need to follow to maintain high quality postsecondary programs in carceral facilities.
Belinda Wheeler, Vera Institute of Justice
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Providing "Voice" to Survey Development using Critical Race Theory (CRT)
As college campuses become more diverse, administrators are increasingly being challenged to find ways to meet the needs of these diverse groups. This is especially important for minoritized populations on predominantly white campuses, who often have a unique set of challenges, which could be addressed with appropriate institutional support. In this session, using the lens of Critical Race Theory, we will review ways in which administrators can design assessments that not only maintain the integrity of the assessment process, but also give an accurate representation of the experiences of minoritized populations.
Mitsu Narui, The Ohio State University - Office of Strategic and Competitive Intelligence
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Real Reflexivity: A Self-Assessment Tool for Limiting Researcher Bias
Researcher positionality statements can often be a perfunctory affair. However, never has it been more important for researchers to practice meaningful reflexivity in order to limit potential bias when their research involves vulnerable populations. This presentation introduces a researcher positionality self-assessment tool that was used in an evaluation study of a peer mentor training program at a university that serves a high population of underrepresented minority students. Participants will learn about the evaluation study, and they will have an opportunity to learn how to use the self-assessment tool in conjunction with peer debriefing to mitigate bias and increase validity.
Rogers Walker, California State University, Monterey Bay
Presentation Type: Poster Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Strategies for Integrating Equity into Assessment
There has been a lot of talk in assessment circles regarding the importance of integrating equity into assessment. What has been lacking has been concrete, easy-to-implement strategies for achieving this. In this session, presenters will provide a brief overview of equity-centered assessment and discuss strategies for integrating it into assessment in- and out-of-the classroom. Participants will leave with ideas they can implement on their campuses.
Gavin Henning, New England College; and Anne E. Lundquist, The Hope Center, Temple University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
The Role of Assessment and IE/IR Professionals in Building Equity-Minded Decision Cultures
Data-informed decision cultures committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) require commitment and collaboration across the institution. Each administrative and academic unit provides unique expertise essential to the pursuit of environments supportive of student success. In this workshop we will explore the intersection of DEI and the institution’s data function, including assessment, institutional effectiveness, and institutional research; develop common understanding of relevant concepts and terms; explore what it means to frame our work with an equity lens; and identify the ways in which we can contribute to efforts to diversify our field. Join us for a safe space to learn together.
Leah Ross, Association for Institutional Research (AIR); Michele J. Hansen, The Ohio State University; and Bethany Miller, Macalester College
Presentation Type: Pre-Institute Workshop
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Using Equity-Centered Assessment Approaches to Challenge the Status Quo
Challenging the status quo means not only interrogating and revising our own assessment practices but also ensuring that information is used to improve learning environments for all our students, faculty, and staff. Two questions that drive our assessment purposes and strategies at Macalester are: (1) How do we engage in meaningful, equity-centered assessment inquiry that creates a more nuanced data picture and compels action? and (2) How do we empower agency and engagement in assessment while also respecting power dynamics between and among students; and between and among faculty and students? In this interactive workshop, participants will learn how to apply elements of Participatory Action Inquiry to engage in equity-centered assessment. We’ll use case studies to illustrate specific reflective and group activities we’ve designed to engage students and faculty in context-specific inquiry for the purpose of improving learning and learning environments. Bring your assessment challenges and questions, and together we’ll brainstorm about how these (and/or other) approaches can be adapted to keep students at the center.
Bethany Miller and Nancy Bostrom, Macalester College
Presentation Type: Pre-Institute Workshop
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
We Have Something in Common!: Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB), Curriculum, and Assessment
This panel will discuss the commonalities between various institutions (HBCUs, Community Colleges, & Small Private Liberal Arts Colleges) as they tackle diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in the curriculum and ultimately assessment. Recognizing that conversations around DEIB are not without issue, the panelists will address challenges in doing this work as Anti-DEIB legislation rolls out across the country.
Bethany Miller, Macalester College; Leeshawn Cradoc Moore, Pitzer College; Tramaine Anderson; Odessa Community College; Shontell Stanford, Morehouse School of Medicine; and Marjorie Trueblood, Rollins College
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
You Are More Powerful Than You Know: Equity-Centered Collaboration in an Assessment Context
Equity-centered collaboration impacts curriculum, culture, and assessment. In this age where DEI and higher education as a values are constantly being questioned, how do we resist the urge to silo and lean into a more collectivist way of being that is equity-centered. This keynote presentation will focus on the benefits of equity-centered collaboration in an assessment context. The presenters will bring real world examples of the ways that they have used equity-centered collaboration in assessment for general education, campus climate, and belonging.
Ellen Peters, University of Puget Sound; and Bethany Miller, Macalester College
Presentation Type: Keynote Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
A Quantitative Review of Brief Mindfulness Integration to Enhance Academic, Emotional, and Social Growth in Classrooms
Research has supported the efficacy of brief mindfulness curricular activities in classroom environments. Promotion of self-awareness, stress-management, and concerted focus offers opportunities for students to increase their academic performance and emotional and social development. This discussion will provide an overview of recent research conducted on the impact mindfulness training has on overall quality of life and health and functioning in college students, as informed by evidence-based research and as a contribution to the body of knowledge of complementary alternative practices in academia.
Steve Peterson, Arizona State University
Presentation Type: Poster Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Emerging Trends in Assessment
Assessment as a Profession, Field, and Discipline: Taking Action, Thinking Ahead
This workshop is a unique opportunity for assessment leaders to come together and define the essence of our professional roles, responsibilities, and career growth. By engaging in individual and group activities, participants will gain a deeper understanding of themselves and the field and develop personalized action plans that help advance their professional growth, scholarly pursuits, and impact on the assessment community. This workshop is ideal for early-career practitioners seeking to clarify their career goals and expectations; mid- and senior-level practitioners looking to enhance their skills, knowledge, and reputation; and senior-level researchers seeking to make a lasting impact and shape the future of the field.
Ruth Slotnick, Bridgewater State University; Nicholas Curtis, University of Wisconsin–Madison; and Laura Gambino, New England Commission of Higher Education
Presentation Type: Pre-Institute Workshop
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Emerging Trends in Assessment
Beyond Demographics: Incorporating Equitable and Inclusive Language about Student Identities in Surveys
A new workgroup within the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) focuses on Equity in Survey Design, Administration, Analysis, and Reporting (ESDAR).The workgroup has made changes to survey items for the 2023 administration. These revisions were aimed at more inclusive and equitable language, particularly related to items asking about student identities such as gender identity, sexual orientation, race/ethnicity, first-generation status, and Greek life participation. Attendees will learn about the rationale behind these revisions, and be asked to reflect on whether their own institutional assessments use equitable and inclusive language.
Angela Miller, Allison BrckaLorenz, Cindy Ann Kilgo, Christen Priddie, Kevin Wenger, and Yihan Zhu, Indiana University Bloomington
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Emerging Trends in Assessment
Bridging Landscapes: The Connection between Critical Thinking and Written Communication VALUE Scores
The VALUE Scoring Collaborative examines the quality of student learning in higher education based on AAC&U’s Essential Learning Outcomes. Through the Collaborative, certified educators evaluate student work using widely accepted standards for each learning outcome represented in the VALUE rubrics. Typically, student work is submitted to be evaluated using only one rubric, however there are institutions that submit work to be evaluated using multiple rubrics. That is, a single piece of student work is evaluated using multiple VALUE rubrics. Extending on the Landscapes of Learning, this session will present results from an examination of student work that was scored using both the Critical Thinking and Written Communication VALUE Rubrics.
Beth Perkins and Kate Drezek McConnell, American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U)
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Emerging Trends in Assessment
Civic Engagement and Evidence of Student Learning: A Call for Clarity
“Civic engagement” can be found on myriad college and university websites, from being listed as one of many general education student learning outcomes to describing a co-curricular experience that connects students with the community beyond campus. It also ranks as one of the more important outcomes and experiences in surveys of faculty and students. That said, the operationalization of the term “civic engagement” varies greatly from institution to institution and even from course to course, faculty to faculty on a single campus. This session will present the results from the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) national civic evidence project, highlighting the linguistic and conceptual complexity of civic engagement, the pedagogical challenges associated with addressing civic engagement in the curriculum and co-curriculum, and the critical role assignment design and alignment play in fostering civic engagement as a desirable and measurable student learning outcome.
Ashley Finley, Jessica Chittum,Kathryn Enke, and Kate Drezek McConnell, American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U); and Martie Kaczmarek and Carolyne Soper, Central Connecticut State University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Emerging Trends in Assessment
Grades as Evidence of Student Learning: The “Third Rail” of Assessment or an Idea Whose Time Has Come?
Common assessment wisdom has eschewed the use of student course grades as evidence of student learning for decades. But have we been too dogmatic in our rejection of what is arguably the only officially recognized record of a students’ learning trajectory at our institutions? The subject of a recent special issue of the Journal of Assessment and Institutional Effectiveness, grades—what they signify, what they miss, and if/when/how we should use them as a measure of student learning—elicit strong opinions within the assessment community. Join this lively panel to hear from the contributors to the special issue on grades and assessment and join this evolving conversation.
David Eubanks, Furman University; Kate Drezek McConnell, American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U); Peter Ewell, National Center for Higher Education Management Systems (NCHEMS); Robert Awkward, Massachusetts Department of Education; Bethany Miller, Macalester College; Gaelan Benway, Quinsigamond Community College; and Mark Nicholas, Framingham State University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Emerging Trends in Assessment
Grand Challenges in Assessment: Leveraging Data Visualization to Support Data-Informed Decision-Making
How can you make sure decision-makers on your campus see and understand assessment data? A great first step is to encourage the use of data visualizations and dashboards that can allow decision-makers to rapidly grasp key assessment findings. Join Grand Challenges in Assessment - Data Visualization Subcommittee members for a demonstration of how data visualizations can support data-informed decision making and a discussion of 2022-2023 survey results of higher education assessment professionals and their current data visualization practices, organizational contexts, and the professional development and resource needs as we consider ways to address current barriers related to implementing/using data visualization.
Rebecca A. Croxton, University of North Carolina at Charlotte; and Amy Svirsky, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Emerging Trends in Assessment
Higher Education Policy and Assessment: Redirecting the Conversation of Quality
Questions of quality and accountability are not new to higher education, but increased views of education as a commodity have destabilized the perceived value of college degrees. Accreditors are rightly demanding better evidence of student learning to measure quality; contrastingly, state policies are pushing to measure quality by graduate wages as a return on investment. What does this mean for assessment professionals? Join in a dynamic discussion of how public policy, institutional values, and financial resources influence what we use to demonstrate the value of post-secondary education, and how we can strengthen the role of assessment data to influence policy.
Bri Lauka, Johns Hopkins University
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Emerging Trends in Assessment
Leveraging the ePortfolio in Learning Communities and Career and Internship Courses for Student
SuccessePortfolio is a high-impact practice taxonomy that can be used to help students transition from college to career. ePortfolios digitally curate student work to provide an authentic representation of learning outcomes. ePortfolios deepen student learning through reflection and serve as a space for students to collect evidence of their learning and experience. Used in a careers course and an internship course, students post and reflect on ePortfolio assignments such as the Clifton StrengthsFinders Assessment, Industry Volunteer Assignments at organizations such as the 500 Festival and Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and their industry internship experience. Building an ePortfolio helps students make connections between courses, assignments, and co-curricular activities through reflection of their past work. And they allow faculty to measure a student’s level of mastery of learning outcomes. These portfolios can also be used by graduates to showcase and communicate their educational achievements. Career readiness is an important issue in higher education. According to the newest report by the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), “How College Contributes to Workforce Success: Employer Views on What Matters Most,” employers see room for improvement in how colleges and universities prepare students for work. On high-impact practices, the AAC&U found that more than four in five employers would be either somewhat more likely or much more likely to consider hiring recent college graduates if they had completed an active or applied experience in college. Internships led the list followed by working in community settings with diverse community partners. Employers value work-study experiences and ePortfolios along with global learning and mentored experiences.
Amy Vaughan and Geoff Sherman, IUPUI
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Emerging Trends in Assessment
Leveraging New Partnerships in Continuous Improvement: Assessment Leaders, Faculty, and Instructional Designers as Joint Collaborators
Assessment leaders traditionally interact with faculty members throughout formal assessment processes. Meanwhile, instructional designer roles have expanded in college and university campuses. Emerging literature has highlighted possibilities for instructional designers to be involved in non-instructional processes, including program quality assurance. This session will provide an overview of the roles of instructional designers and a sample assessment plan involving contributions from instructional designers. The audience will also engage in discussions about ways that assessment leaders, faculty members, and instructional designers can jointly collaborate to streamline the formal assessment process.
Terrance Cao, Sohee Lee, Jennifer Miyake-Trapp, and Elias Saade, Pepperdine University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Emerging Trends in Assessment
New Methodology for Academic Program Reviews
This presentation overviews the revamped academic program review (APR) approach taken by faculty and administrators at the University of Southern Indiana. In particular, we discuss the APR challenges that existed with the previous APR process, the implementation of the new process, and the institutional benefits that result from the change. Attendees will gain insights on the benefits of an internally streamlined, faculty-centric APR process that is contextualized in data provided by a third-party vendor.
Wesley T. Durham, Shelly Blunt, Kyle Mara, and Zane Mitchell, University of Southern Indiana
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Emerging Trends in Assessment
Promoting Culture Change through Confidence and Competency Building
Creating a supportive and engaged community around assessment practices can change the culture of assessment in higher education. A strategy for developing confidence in assessment skills and practices is to provide learning and development opportunities for faculty and staff. This session will (a) introduce organizational culture and change theories, (b) share case examples, and (c) discuss practices participants can adapt to meet the needs of their institution.
Cindy Cogswell, New York University; and Jennifer Nailos, The University of Texas at Austin
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Emerging Trends in Assessment
Pulling Calm Out of Chaos: We Addressed the Delivery Model...Time to Address the Student and the Teacher
Academic performance anxiety initially manifests equally in the body as it does the mind. Extrinsic stressors and influences consciously impact not only intrinsic motivation and academic performance capabilities, but also subconsciously negate physiological processes that sabotage the brain and mind. Successfully managing negative stressors and influences is comingled between instructor and student.
Steve Peterson, Arizona State University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Emerging Trends in Assessment
Qualitative Findings from the First Equity-Centered Landscape Assessment
Models and theories for equity-centered assessment abound while the extent to which practitioners engage in ECA is under-explored and discussed. In July 2021, we sent survey invitations via a web-based survey platform to listservs for higher education assessment professionals examining how, and to what extent, they centered equity in their assessment practice. Altogether, 568 people participated in the anonymous survey. This presentation shares the qualitative findings from two open-ended questions: what support do you need to engage in ECA and what are the challenges you face in engaging in ECA?
Ciji A. Heiser, Developing Capacity Coaching, LLC; Janelle Coleman, University of Tennessee; Kellie Dixon, Baylor University; and Katherine Yngve, Purdue University
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Emerging Trends in Assessment
Results from the First Equity-Centered Landscape Assessment
Models and theories for equity-centered assessment abound while the extent to which practitioners engage in ECA is under-explored and discussed. In July 2021, we sent survey invitations via a web-based platform to listservs for higher education assessment professionals. We examined how, and to what extent, they centered equity in their assessment practice. Altogether, 568 people participated in the anonymous survey. The purpose of this presentation is threefold: 1) to share a summary of results from the survey, 2) engage in collective meaning making regarding the findings, and 3) identify three to five action items resulting from the survey.
Ciji A. Heiser, Developing Capacity Coaching, LLC; Gavin Henning, New England College; and Anne E. Lundquist, The Hope Center, Temple University
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Emerging Trends in Assessment
Rethinking Learning: A Holistic View of the Student's Learning Landscape
Building on earlier research in the co-curricular space, this presentation will report back on findings from a national survey informing practices in higher education institutions in managing and assessing co-curricular learning. The presenters will outline a proposed definition of co-curricular learning and engage the participants in a discussion around activities at their institutions that are considered co-curricular, where they are housed, and how they are assessed. The intent is to get the participants’ input in shaping the co-curricular landscape and to initiate the discussion around effective assessment practices in these spaces.
Chadia N. Abras and Bri Lauka, Johns Hopkins University; Suzanne Carbonaro, HelioCampus; Colin Suchland, Lincoln Land Community College; and Jessica Taylor, University of Tennessee-Chattanooga
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Emerging Trends in Assessment
A Framework for Harnessing the Benefits and Vast Potential of Accreditation for Student Success and Faculty Development
Beyond assessing a program or institution’s adherence and conformity to educational and professional standards, and other normative factors such as boosting a program or institution’s profile and public recognition, accreditation presents vast benefits for student success, leadership, and faculty development that are often untapped and underutilized.
Through an eclectic program evaluation lens, including Bradshaw’s four types of needs and an integrative theoretical orientation using systems, complexity, and intergenerational theories, this presentation provides a framework for exploring the benefits of accreditation and discusses how to maximize the enormous potential of accreditation.
Isaac Karikari and Stephanie Homstad, University of North Dakota
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Faculty Development
Building Assessment Leadership in Faculty: Toward a Sustainable Culture and Practice of Assessment of Student Learning
This presentation describes the evolution of assessment leadership from teaching and learning support units to academic units in a private urban Jesuit institution. Literature suggests a distributed assessment leadership model has advantages for building positive assessment culture. Our journey moving from assessment coordination centered in teaching and learning support offices to coordination of assessment activities in academic affairs by investing in assessment supports in academic units may be informative to other institutions. Data from assessment reports, academic program review, and accreditation project evaluations track the impetus and impacts of this strategy.
Rachel Shefner, Jessica Mansbach, and Stacy Wenzel, Loyola University Chicago
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Faculty Development
Continued Collaboration: Advancing Student Success through Faculty Development and Assessment Practices
The work of faculty development and assessment informs and enhances the goals and programming of each area. Collaboration between these two areas is essential for student success. During this session, presenters will discuss the benefits of collaboration between offices of faculty development and assessment. They will review ways they work together toward achieving strategic goals. There will be time for active engagement from participants related to potential collaborations between faculty development and assessment practices.
Jessica M. Turos, Holly Barber, Chelsea Chandler, Kristen Hidinger, and Sally Thelen, Bowling Green State University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Faculty Development
Creating a Culture for the Advancement of Transformative Teaching and Learning through the Faculty Development Program
Teachers play a crucial role in teaching and learning. According to McKinsey (2007), the quality of education cannot exceed the quality of teachers. Teachers are important agents in transformative education. One major support given by an institution is its faculty development program where teachers are ushered to the profession. Northern Bukidnon State College as a new converted state college from a community college implemented the C²AST²LE (Creating a Culture for the Advancement of the Art and Science of Transformative Teaching and Learning). The program encompasses the timeline from onboarding of teachers to instructional leadership training.
Jovelyn G. Delosa, Daniel S. Lerongan, and Maria Theresa B. Markines, Northern Bukidnon State College
Presentation Type: Poster Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Faculty Development
Data-Driven Reflection on Assessment Practices of Program Learning Outcomes
To promote the culture of faculty-driven assessment and provide faculty development opportunities, we have developed and implemented a peer-evaluation program of assessment practice in the past years. Its implementation strategies consist of valid and reliable evaluation procedures of assessment reports, effective feedback communication, and peer mentoring. As a follow-up strategy for continuous improvement, we have practiced a data-driven reflection process at the closing of each assessment reporting cycle. This session will present the institutional process of using the peer-evaluation results to improve assessment practices in program learning outcomes. Sample evaluation tools and adjustments made in recent years will be shared.
Juliet K. Hurtig and Eunhee Kim, Ohio Northern University
Presentation Type: Poster Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Faculty Development
Growing Your Skills: Professional Development for the Assessment Community
Many assessment professionals need to seek out professional development opportunities in order to better help them with their assessment role or duties. With limited resources, how do people select a professional development program that will fit their needs? Navigating through the various professional development programs offered for new assessment professionals can be daunting. This presentation will explore the types of programs offered and examine the impact of one professional development program on new professionals’ skills, abilities, and attitudes. Participants will be able to determine their needs and find a program that best aligns with those needs.
Tisha M. Paredes and Sheri Popp, Weave
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Faculty Development
Leadership in Academic Medicine: Estimating Program Effectiveness Using Quasi-Experimental Methods
The Leadership in Academic Medicine Program (LAMP) is a year-long program offered by the Indiana University School of Medicine to assist junior faculty in developing successful careers and becoming effective leaders in academic medicine. Participants are led through a monthly curriculum-based professional development seminar. To date, more than 700 faculty have participated since its inception in 2003. To estimate the program's effect on faculty likelihood of achieving promotion and tenure, we used quasi-experimental design methods (propensity score matching, matched samples). This session will focus on outcomes of the assessment and the implementation of quasi-experimental techniques as an assessment tool.
Kevin Wenger, Bruck Mulat, Megan Palmer, and Amy Ribera, Indiana University School of Medicine
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Faculty Development
Living in Their Own Private Idaho: Motivating Faculty Development
My institution lacked a Director of Institutional Research for three years. Data was collected but only nominally examined. One unintended consequence of this absence: many faculty gained an overly positive sense of their classroom success. I discuss my experience joining a program after a three-year Office of Institutional Research (OIR) drought and presenting 2.5 years of data regarding student satisfaction concerning professors, course content, and curricular coherence at our college. Finally, I ask participants to discuss sound assessment practices (authentic assessment, backward learning design, etc.) that may help me motivate faculty to more successful interactions with their educational materials and their students.
Linda Baughman, College of Information and Cyberspace
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Faculty Development
Microcredentialing the Faculty Professional Learning Journey
As a polytechnic institution, Humber welcomes new faculty who have deep discipline and industry knowledge but who vary widely in their post-secondary teaching experience. Our mandatory Teaching Excellence Program is designed for faculty taking on new full-time roles. This year, we have created microcredentials to allow faculty to personalize their areas of focus, to build their capacities where needed most, and to recognize their individual preferences. Humber supports microcredentials that are competency-based, and we are reorganizing existing certificates to enable faculty to receive recognition of their prior learning as they deepen their learning with us in these certificates.
Dawn Macaulay and Ranya Khan, Humber Institute of Teaching and Advanced Learning
Presentation Type: Poster Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Faculty Development
Reaching the 25%: Creating a Culture of Assessment through Equity-Based Practices
At Rock Valley College, a common program and course assessment target is 75% of students achieving 75% or higher on each measure. Administrative and faculty assessment leaders challenged our curricular and co-curricular faculty and staff to examine the circ*mstances under which 25% of our students are not meeting the target. Using equity-based practices, we created professional development opportunities, including Universal Design Learning, Understanding by Design, and storytelling, to create a cross-campus culture of assessment. We will discuss our successes and challenges in creating equity-based approaches and increasing assessment participation with both faculty and staff.
Danielle F. Fundora Hardesty, Lisa Mehlig, and Suzanne Miller, Rock Valley College
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Faculty Development
RIDLE Me This: An Innovative Faculty Learning Community(FLC) Model Closing Equity Gaps in Undergraduate Bottleneck Courses
The XCITE Center for Teaching and Learning at UC Riverside has created an FLC model called Rethinking Instructional Design for Learning Engagement (RIDLE). RIDLE is made up of four FLCs with a design-thinking focus: RIDLE LX Empower Active Learning; RIDLE RX Promote Equitable Learning; RIDLE FX Foster Flexible Learning; RIDLE DX Advance Digital Inclusion. In this presentation, XCITE instructional designers, faculty development specialists, and educational technologists will share how these FLCs were designed and facilitated to transform 60 undergraduate bottleneck courses over 9 months to close equity gaps, increase student persistence, lower DFW rates, and enhance just-in-time student interventions.
Swati Ramani, Annie Ditta, Richard Edwards, and Israel Fletes, University of California Riverside
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Faculty Development
Shooting from Perimeter and in the Paint: Assessment Faculty Development from All Angles
Developing a strong culture of assessment has been a strong priority in our institution in recent years. To that end, an infrastructure has been created in our institution with the goal of developing faculty knowledge, skills, and attitudes toward assessment. This was accomplished through a systematic process of faculty development offers at the department, program, course, and individual levels, including but not limited to an annual assessment institute, program-level and course-level workshops, and group book clubs. Planning for faculty development activities was guided by a survey of the faculty to determine baseline knowledge and skills.
Lauren Schlesselman, Diego Valente, and Jessica Palliardi, University of Connecticut
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Faculty Development
SLANG: Simplifying Language for Assessment with Nervous Groups
Assessment for two-year colleges is uniquely challenging. Many faculty are subject matter experts by training, learning pedagogy, and institutional assessment on the job. Assessment personnel are often existing faculty on contract and have little formal training in assessment, creating a steep learning curve. Administration and assessment staff can increase faculty participation and reduce hesitancy or outright avoidance by developing tools to create accessibility in assessment concepts and language. This session will address challenging terminology, create connections between existing faculty practice and assessment tasks, and develop assessment communication for laypersons through the program-level assessment revision experience of Northeastern Oklahoma A&M College.
Jordan M. Adams, Northeastern Oklahoma A&M College
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Faculty Development
Telling the Story of Effective Teaching and Learning through Authentic Student Assessment in Higher Education for Reappointment, Promotion, and Tenure
Faculty and administrators are struggling with the idea of the use of data in the faculty reappointment, promotion, and tenure (RPT) process. This dilemma creates a situation where faculty are placed in a situation where they are not able to tell their story of effectiveness in the classroom, and administrators are receiving boilerplate and sometimes meaningless data. Authentic student assessments provide for faculty and administrators opportunities for meaningful, impactful, and student-driven data for the purpose of RPT. This session provides common sense practices, conversions of qualitative and quantitative data, and consistency so that our story can be told and be heard.
Ray W. Francis, Central Michigan University; and Mark Deschaine, The University of Mississippi
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Faculty Development
Triangulating Culture Change: Assessment of Active Learning Initiatives at the University of Georgia
Instructor development. Student engagement. Classroom enhancement. The University of Georgia is growing a campus-wide culture of active learning through these three targets as part of a five-year initiative. The current body of literature supports the use of active learning strategies to improve academic performance—but can it also impact measurable change in the qualities that lead to lifelong learning? Join us as we share an update on the strategy, implementation, and assessment of activities designed to strengthen a campus culture of active learning thereby fostering curiosity, initiative, reflection, and connection among undergraduate students.
Katherine Burr and Wynonna Brewer, University of Georgia
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Advanced
Primary Track: Faculty Development
Wait. You Want Me to Teach Writing in My Math Class?!
In a world where much communication is limited to 280 characters and is littered with acronyms, college students are increasingly producing low-quality writing assignments. UNH's College of Professional Studies Online is addressing this issue at the instructor level, through professional development that helps non-writing faculty create engaging writing assignments and meaningful dialogue with students around writing performance improvement. Piloted in January 2023, “Writing Across the Curriculum” is a seven-module, self-paced micro-credential developed by faculty, for faculty. This poster presentation explains how CPS is defining good college writing and preparing faculty to teach and assess writing at the instructor level across disciplines.
Sue Farris, UNH College of Professional Studies Online
Presentation Type: Poster Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Faculty Development
Applying the Learner-Centered Approach to the Co-Curriculum Model to Fraternity and Sorority Contexts
The Learner-Centered Approach to the Co-Curriculum Model allows co-curricular educators—including those in fraternity and sorority life contexts—to place learning at the center of their work, ensuring alignment among learning goals, interventions, and assessment methods. This integrated model of the scholarship of teaching and learning with co-curricular practice will contribute to richer and more measurable learning for students in postsecondary education. This session will assist participants by providing a brief overview of the Learner-Centered Approach to the Co-Curriculum Model and then devoting time to focus on practical applications and considerations for practitioners and leaders in fraternity and sorority organizations.
Hannah Keith, Zeta Tau Alpha Fraternity
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Fraternity and Sorority Life
Artifacts, Rubrics, Tracking… oh my! How do I Capture Evidence of Learning?
We know students gain knowledge and skills in co-curricular spaces, though capturing evidence of that learning requires intentional planning and design. Artifacts (the tangible ways students display their learning) and rubrics (an evaluation tool designed to measure said learning) go hand-in-hand in assessing, documenting, and sharing data on student learning in the context of organizations and fraternity and sorority life. In this experiential session, participants will practice designing a comprehensive assessment approach by identifying (or developing) learning artifacts, discussing appropriate evaluation tools, and considering ways to help students track and articulate their learning.
Brenton Wimmer, University of Central Oklahoma; and Katherine Burr, University of Georgia
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Fraternity and Sorority Life
Assessing Learning in Fraternities and Sororities: A New Vision for Proving and Improving Learning and Leadership
Fraternities and sororities may be well known for their social activities, but they also provide opportunities for learning and leadership development. However, the assessment of learning in these organizations is often overlooked and rarely performed. Assessment is crucial for proving and improving learning and leadership in fraternities and sororities. The fraternal experience can provide access to many types of educational programs, such as experiential learning, workshops, seminars, and project-based learning that can develop members' skills and knowledge. Assessment of these learning opportunities can provide evidence of learning to both students and employers. New tools like Comprehensive Learner Records (CLRs) can enable this evidence to be share in meaningful ways and showcase students' achievements and skills gain through membership. Join us to learn how CLRs can transform the ways in which we assess and document student learning in fraternal experiences.
Jim Barber, William & Mary; and Amber Garrison Duncan, Competency-Based Education Network (C-BEN)
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Fraternity and Sorority Life
How to Translate Not Only Your Greek Letters, but Also Your Data
Do you love data but find it hard to share it with others? Do others find it difficult to understand the impact of your numbers? Do people have trouble grasping what the numbers mean? This session will review the translation practices found in the book "Making Numbers Count: The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers and How to Use Them to Your Advantage." In fraternity/sorority life, we have many stakeholders within and outside of the university. Having the best data is only as meaningful as far as someone can understand and act upon it.
Becky Gleason, Zeta Tau Alpha; and Noah Borton, Delta Upsilon
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Fraternity and Sorority Life
Work Smarter, Not Harder: Selecting an Assessment Approach to Tell Your Story
Determining the optimal assessment approach for a project can be challenging, but attempting to do it all is a drain on resources. Aligning your assessment approach with the project’s desired outcome will set you up to create an impactful narrative detailing your project’s successes and areas of opportunity without overdoing it (or worse, failing to tell your project’s story at all). This program will provide a brief overview of four assessment approaches, demonstrate a model for selecting the right approach, and share strategies for turning your assessment data into the impactful story you need.
Liz Morehouse, Alpha Gamma Delta; and Delaney Parker, Sigma Kappa
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Fraternity and Sorority Life
Assessing Student Experiences with Writing: A Ten-Year Perspective from National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE)
In 2013, the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) in partnership with the Council of Writing Program Administrators launched the “Experiences with Writing” Topical Module to assess the quality of student writing assignments and the use of writing as a mechanism for learning. This session will explore lessons from ten years of assessment of writing and its connection to engagement. Additionally, we will discuss the process for updating the module with the emergence of new pedagogical techniques, increased emphasis on diversity and equity, and innovative and revolutionary AI technologies that greatly influence academic writing.
Kevin Wenger and Robert Gonyea, Indiana University Bloomington
Presentation Type: Poster Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: General Education
Creating an Inviting General Education Assessment Process that Engages Faculty
One of the greatest challenges to meaningful general education assessment is getting faculty buy-in. Faculty resistance to general education assessment due to fear, misunderstanding, distrust, and time constraints creates challenges for general education assessment leaders. This presentation showcases one community college’s strategy for increasing faculty engagement with general education assessment and the faculty response to the new process. Findings from four semesters of data collection on faculty engagement will be shared and participants will leave with practical action steps for increasing faculty engagement with general education assessment.
Jennifer Billman, HACC, Central Pennsylvania's Community College
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: General Education
Deconstructing the Tapestry: Unravelling Old Patterns to Create a Stronger Culture of General Education Assessment at Colorado Technical University
A challenge facing many higher education institutions is how to improve the culture of assessment. In this presentation, we ask the question: does your institution assess student learning in General Education to drive improvement, or do you simply do assessment? At our institution, we thought we had a beautiful tapestry of assessment. When we started to pull on some loose threads, however, we discovered some old, outdated patterns. This presentation will describe our journey in changing our thinking about assessment (and assessment data) and will provide practical advice for building a culture of General Education assessment at your institution.
Jennifer B. Daines and Ada Uche, Colorado Technical University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: General Education
Designing a New Assessment Process for a New General Education Curriculum
Concurrent with the implementation of our new Geneseo Learning Outcomes for Baccalaureate Education (GLOBE) Curriculum, Geneseo piloted a new assessment process. From our recent accreditation self-study, we were aware that gen education assessment was a weakness in our academic assessment. Working through the new governance structure, we designed a pilot for a new process. This presentation will examine the factors used to analyze the existing assessment program, what structural elements on campus could help to support improved assessment, and how to address campus cultural factors while implementing change. Finally, we will address data gathered during the pilot currently in process and how we incorporate it.
Melanie N. Blood, Lori Bernard, and Kurt Fletcher, SUNY College at Geneseo
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: General Education
Exploring Power BI Visualizations for General Education Curriculum Assessment
This presentation provides an overview of the redesigned General Education Curriculum assessment process at Florida State University. It is focused on the pivotal technologies used to develop and implement the centralized and automated data collection and reporting process. At the forefront of the new approach is the use of Power BI to aggregate and visualize student performance on learning outcomes at different levels of detail. These visualizations allow faculty and other stakeholders to direct their efforts on the analysis and use of the reported student performance data to identify potential areas for improvement and effectively target solutions.
Galiya Tabulda and Caitlyn Jessee, Florida State University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: General Education
General Education Assessment: The Basics
College students spend most of their first two years taking required general education courses. If schools ask students to spend this much time in general education courses, then logic suggests that schools should evaluate whether students learn what the school believes it teaches. While informal evaluation likely happens at the classroom level, schools should assess the general education curriculum in the same way they assess all other educational programs. In this session, attendees will learn the basics of general education assessment, basics that apply to every school seeking to know what their students are learning.
Sandy Vandercook and Michael Wang, New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: General Education
If You Build It, They Will Come: Faculty Engagement in High-Quality, Programmatic Assessment of a General Education Program
Indiana State University’s assessment plan for its Foundational Studies Program provides a model for comprehensive assessment of general education that engages faculty in the process and program in meaningful and collaborative ways. Workshops and Assessment Day prepare faculty for participation, include them in artifact assessment, and provide them opportunities to engage with analysis of results. These activities, and a culture of communities of practice, bring faculty from across the university together, creating significant opportunities for engagement and input into program refreshment. This session will share insights from our approach that participants may use to enrich faculty engagement at their institution.
Ann Rider, Liz Brown, Linda Maule, Ellie Rippy, and Kelley Woods-Johnson, Indiana State University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: General Education
Integrating a Qualitative Analysis with Quantitative Assessments for the Evaluation of First-Year Experience (FYE) Course
This presentation will share the assessment methods, results, and lessons learned from the First-Year Experience (FYE) course at Yamagata University in Japan. We have continuously conducted direct assessments and indirect assessments to improve our course. In addition to these quantitative analyses, this presentation also analyzes students’ comments in the student surveys using the text mining method, which can extract essential concepts and patterns from large amounts of text data. We will show how this qualitative approach supplements and also substantiates the results of quantitative assessments, giving us a broader view of the educational effectiveness of the course.
Satoko Imaizumi, Takahiro Abe, Douglas Gloag, Naoto Kikuta, Katsumi Senyo, and Tetsuya Shiroishi, Yamagata University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: General Education
Jumpstarting General Education Program Review: A Systems Thinking Approach to the Self-Study
Often overlooked in the discussion of general education program development and assessment is the issue of program review. The Association for General and Liberal Studies (AGLS) offers a “Guide to Assessment and Program Review” intended to stimulate a collaborative discussion for the improvement of a general education program. At the heart of the “Guide” is a set of twenty systems-analysis questions aimed at improving program quality. This workshop will focus on the initial stage of the self-study and provides attendees an opportunity to “test-drive” the tool and practice basic general education program evaluation steps.
Jody Dekorte, Purdue University Global; and Christine Robinson, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Presentation Type: Pre-Institute Workshop
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: General Education
Keeping the “A” Word Out of General (Education) Circulation: Reframing Assessment as One of Interrogation, Discovery, and Improvement
Many of our colleagues have an allergy to the word “assessment.” At the same time, and as we know from our own scholarly lives, it’s critical that we methodically inquire about the ways our work can be improved. In that spirit, we established an ethos of assessment that asks, rather simply, “What was learned?” As a question, we can use this to interrogate our core curriculum, from the outcomes, to the courses offered, and ultimately to student learning. This session reflects on the most (in)effective ways and places this process has played out and what that can teach us all.
Brad G. Knight and Martyn Oliver, American University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: General Education
Mapping Complex Relationships Across General Education Curricular and Co-Curricular Experiences
How can we convey the complex, wide-spread efforts to achieve outcomes associated with general education curricular and co-curricular goals? Mapping allows us to do this when it is used as a key approach to examine the role of various components of learning experiences and how they build toward shared outcomes. Outcome maps can also help capture students’ perceptions of the learning experience and frame the full spectrum of work being done across the institution. The applied process and results will be shared. Participants will reflect on both structures and relationships that may assist with their own mapping initiatives.
Austen L. Krill, Agnes Scott College
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: General Education
Maximizing Learning Within Your General Education Curriculum
At the heart of most general education programs is what takes place in individual courses and individual classrooms across campus. A well-designed general education curriculum is ultimately only as good as the teaching and learning practice that takes place within the courses that comprise the general education curriculum. This workshop focuses on this reality by considering general education learning from multiple perspectives. It will begin by highlighting programmatic opportunities provided by different models of general education along with the learning outcomes that each model is designed to foster. The session will then investigate what we empirically know about how students learn and consider practical pedagogical strategies that leverage that foundation. Assignment design and leveraging high-impact practices will be included within the scope of this pedagogical discussion. Attendees will also consider data-driven sources for course improvement efforts, including end of semester evaluations and the results of learning outcomes assessment activities, as well as how to best utilize that information. Attendees are encouraged to come to this workshop with course syllabi and assignments as time will be provided to engage in course revision activities. Those who attend this interactive presentation will leave with concrete, evidence-based strategies they can employ in their general education curriculum and courses.
Edward Watson, American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U)
Presentation Type: Pre-Institute Workshop
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: General Education
Necessary Alignments: Integrating and Assessing a New Set of Institution-Level and General Education Learning Outcomes
For the first time in Indiana Wesleyan’s history, both traditional and adult education academic units now share a common set of institution-level and general education learning outcomes. Insights will be shared on the tasks and timelines involved in creating, vetting, integrating, and assessing both new sets. Attendees will consider the importance of fully utilizing a university’s shared governance structure as a key part of the process. Presenters will describe the challenges and opportunities associated with designing and verifying the “necessary alignments” at all levels, in both program capstone courses as well as general education courses. The annual assessment process will be covered, including IWU’s online rater calibration training course, their assessment report forms, and data visualization approaches.
Frank Ponce, Jim Vermilya, and Bart Breuhler, Indiana Wesleyan University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: General Education
Nothing General About Assessment in General Education
Through our multi-year process of defining and implementing a new general education curriculum, the institution recognized a priority to expand the culture of assessment to our general education space. To that end, a general education assessment infrastructure has been created with the goals of ensuring alignment of courses and assessments with general education objectives; creating equitable and accessible courses; and expanding faculty assessment knowledge, skills, and attitudes. This was accomplished through faculty-led support and training for other general education faculty.
Lauren Schlesselm, Pamela Bedore, and Jamie Kleinman, University of Connecticut
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: General Education
Using a Common Rubric to Assess General Education Competencies
We all know we need to assess general education competencies. That we need to assess is not the issue. How we need to assess it is the issue. One way to streamline general education assessment is to create a common rubric to assess that competency. In this session, the presenter will explain how her school developed a common rubric to assess its written communication competency. The rubric shows the discrete writing skills valued by the institution, and attendees will see how the rubric can be used for any writing assignment in any general education course.
Sandy Vandercook, New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary
Presentation Type: Poster Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: General Education
Using Culminating Experience Courses as Part of a Well-Rounded Assessment of a General Education Program
In 2019, Central Washington University rolled out a new general education program. It consists of multiple elements and concludes with a Culminating Experience course that is taken toward the end of the student’s major. This course challenges students to draw connections between their own disciplinary studies and their general education experiences and learning. To ensure that the Culminating Experience course is achieving its outcomes, it is being assessed annually. This presentation covers the process of assessing relevant artifacts for each Culminating Experience outcome and providing useful information that the programs can use for improvement.
Kurt Kirstein and Kara Gabriel, Central Washington University
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: General Education
Whereto English Department(s) and Humanities: Preparing to Assess Curricular Change and Student Success
Preparing a department for an in-depth curriculum revision involves careful planning and collaboration. I will discuss the key steps that need to be taken to ensure a successful revision process. This includes setting clear goals and objectives, establishing a revision committee, conducting a thorough analysis of the current curriculum, and engaging stakeholders. I will also cover best practices for designing a revised curriculum, including incorporating feedback from faculty and students, and aligning with industry standards. By following these guidelines, departments can create a curriculum that is effective, engaging, and relevant to the needs of students and the workforce.
Estela Ene, IUPUI
Presentation Type: Poster Session
Audience Level: Advanced
Primary Track: General Education
Assessing Experiential Global Learning: A Work in Progress – Phase I
UConn has launched an assessment plan focusing on proximal and distal impacts on students of participation in Experiential Global Learning (EGL) programing. The plan calls for the administration of an Intercultural Competency Scale to a sample of students who have not participated in EGL as a comparison group, and to all EGL participants as a pre- and post-test. The UConn Intercultural Competency Scale (UICS) is in beta testing and is designed to collect demographics and student responses to subscales focusing on Knowledge, Attitudes, and Behaviors/skills related to cultural competencies related to the UConn General Education Requirements.
Scott W. Brown, Dylan Boczar, Faeze Safari, Ngozi Taffe, and Daniel Weiner, University of Connecticut
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Global Learning
Assessing Global Learning at the Undergraduate Level: An Interdisciplinary, Campus-Wide Approach
Although different assessment instruments exist for intercultural learning, how can these be applied to assess specific campus-level global learning objectives across various courses on campus? This presentation seeks to address this question through discussing a process that was used to develop a survey instrument that instructors across disciplines can use with students who have participated in various global learning experiences. This survey specifically assesses two campus-level global learning objectives. Building on previous work, this presentation will discuss the process used to develop and implement the survey, including preliminary results, and “how-to” practical advice related to research design and institutional review board protocols that will facilitate faculty of various disciplinary backgrounds to replicate at their own institutions.
Audrey Ricke, Lamia Scherzinger, Frank Wadsworth, Lin Zheng, and Leslie Bozeman, IUPUI
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Global Learning
Designing and Evaluating a Certificate-First Bachelor's Degree for a Worldwide Audience
Ensign College and partner BYU-Pathway Worldwide specialize in applied, certificate-first degrees for students living in 180+ countries. These programs are based on a data-driven program and course development and improvement model. This presentation will focus on the impact of the applied, certificate-first online program design for student outcomes as well as the effectiveness of its data-driven review and improvement model.
Alan L. Young, Andrew Gibbons, Benjamin Malczyk, and Jon Nichols, Ensign College
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Global Learning
Flexible Learning: The Context of a New State College in Northern Mindanao
Northern Bukidnon State College is the youngest state college in the Philippines and aimed to develop innovative approaches for a quality learning environment for School Year 2021-2022. It aimed to determine demographic, socioeconomic, and flexible learning experiences of respondents through a survey. Respondents of the study were selected through a quota sampling with a total of 625 participants. Female dominance was evident, and the 21-30 age range lived below the poverty line due to low educational attainment of families and belonged to Higaonon and Talaandig tribes. Financial constraints and poor internet connectivity were challenges; but based on FGD respondents, we’re satisfied with their flexible learning experience.
Maria Theresa B. Markines, Jovelyn G. Delosa, and Daniel S. Lerongan, Northern Bukidnon State College
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Global Learning
Latinx Students Navigate Language in Cuba - Assessing the Impact of Short-Term Programs Abroad
What is the invisible labor for Latinx students from predominantly white institutions who travel with their peers to Spanish-speaking countries? This presentation focuses on the long-term impact of short-term study abroad experiences, particularly focused on the voices of Latinx students. Using a combination of qualitative surveys and interviews with alumni, we learned about the ways in which race, ethnicity, and language influenced how students experienced the Cuba extended-studies course. We found the Cuba course was the site for many students to stop and think about questions of power and privilege.
Mandy Brookins, The Forum on Education Abroad; and Angela Castañeda, DePauw University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Global Learning
Learned Lessons in Global Learning: Results from a Student-Focused Strategy
Global Learning programming can be delivered in multiple forms and layouts – there is no 'one size fits all.' This session analyzes how success, failure, and student behavior impact and inspire institutional strategy in designing, delivering, and staffing Global Learning. This presentation shares experiences gained from overseeing two Global Learning programs at two universities.
Paulo Zagalo-Melo and Anezka Viskova-Robertson, Western Michigan University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Global Learning
Transitioning to Problem-Based Learning in Higher Education
The 21st century has seen an increased need for graduates with the skills and knowledge to tackle complex real-world problems. Problem-based learning (PBL) has been identified as an effective pedagogical approach to developing such skills, and many developed countries have successfully integrated PBL into their STEM education. However, adopting PBL in developing countries presents unique challenges that must be addressed to ensure the approach's success. This session explores the opportunities and challenges of transitioning to PBL in STEM education in developing countries, focusing on how PBL can produce work-ready graduates who can meet the demands of the 21st-century workforce. This study is empirical research that utilized a survey research design to collect data using a structured questionnaire to collect data from university teacher trainees in sub-Saharan African countries. Data were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics. This session contributes to the ongoing discussion on the importance of PBL in teacher education and its potential to develop work-ready graduates in developing countries.
Jumoke I. Oladele, Mdutshekelwa Ndlovu, and Erica Spangenberg, University of Johannesburg; Dorcas S. Daramola and Gabriel A. Obimuyiwa, University of Ilorin
Presentation Type: Poster Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Global Learning
Cultivating Graduate-Level Assessment Skills through an A+ Inquiry Thesis Alternative
Explore how the A+ Inquiry framework is being utilized as a thesis-alternative capstone project for Master of Education students. A+ Inquiry synthesizes stages of inquiry that are common among assessment, evaluation, and research initiatives. This session addresses the stages of the framework, guiding questions relevant to each stage, how the stages align to common sections of a thesis paper and postsecondary assessment frameworks, and requirements for completing a master's level A+ Inquiry capstone project. Developing transferable inquiry skills through an A+ Inquiry capstone experience may equip graduate students to be better prepared for supporting assessment initiatives at postsecondary institutions.
Nathan C. Anderson and Daniel Conn, Minot State University; and Kaydra Weigel, Noridian Healthcare Solutions
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Graduate/Professional Education
Exploring Assessment Data Holistically and Contextually for Professional Programs
Assessment in higher education is dictated by the need to certify learning. We end up investing a lot of time and resources in summative assessment when it is too late to have an impact on what and how students learn. This is especially problematic for professional programs where learners desire a portfolio of authentic and experiential learning experiences. How do we take the data we collect and put it into context? What strategies can we use to draw out the stories they're trying to tell us about holistic learner experience, identities, pain points, and needs to support success?
Mamta Saxena and Asim Javed, Northeastern University, College of Professional Studies
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Graduate/Professional Education
Implementing Practical and Effective Doctoral Assessment
What does successful instruction and mentorship look like at the doctoral level? Too often, PhD programs cannot answer this question because of the lack of a coherent assessment system particular to their unique needs. They struggle because of small numbers and individualized nature of study. This is exacerbated by institutional adherence to strict templates or quantitative results, which do not reflect the information programs need to focus on improvement. This session will present several foundational principles for doing better, authentic PhD assessment utilizing common doctoral program data regardless of discipline, gleaned from individual consultations with over forty different programs.
Andrea C. Barra, Emory University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Graduate/Professional Education
Incorporating Students in Graduate and Professional Programs’ Continuous Improvement Model
This interactive presentation will discuss the incorporation of student and stakeholder data into existing programmatic evaluation continuous improvement models. The model presented is currently utilized by graduate professional programs including Nursing, Public Health, and Occupational Therapy. Participants will learn about the model’s components, data collection, analysis, review, and dissemination processes, and the impact upon programmatic effectiveness within the following three domains: Recruitment and Retention, Candidate Competence, and Completer Impact. Participants will be provided with actionable tools to incorporate student and stakeholder data into existing program evaluation continuous improvement models or adapt the model presented to meet their specific evaluation needs.
Marclyn D. Porter, University of Tennessee-Chattanooga
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Graduate/Professional Education
Indiana CARES (Creating Accountability and Building Relationships to Eradicate Sex Harassment): Assessing Daily Supportive and Nonsupportive Experiences in the Lab
Indiana CARES (Creating Accountability and Building Relationships to Eradicate Sex Harassment) uses power-approach and moral licensing theories examining how power mobilizes harassing and racist mistreatment of trainees. Our rigorous experience sampling research captures the prevalence of mentee mistreatments and the relationship to their mentors’ power embodiment. This presentation examines our methods in finding that approximately 32% of graduate students and post-doctoral fellows in NIH-funded laboratories experience or observe these mistreatments, examines the role of mentor power incidence rates and mistreatment impact, and designs an evidence-based intervention for faculty mentors focusing on power, empathy, bystander intervention, and authentic allyship.
Peggy S. Stockdale, Tuyen Dinh, Ann Kimble-Hill, Amanda Mosier, Randall Roper, Darius Washington, and Wei Wu, IUPUI
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Advanced
Primary Track: Graduate/Professional Education
Maximizing Student Performance with Fewer Exams
This session will describe a restructured assessment model applied to the Clinical Medicine for the Physician Assistant (PA) course series. This change resulted in fewer students failing their exams and increased faculty satisfaction. We will also evaluate for changes in standardized exams including the PACKRAT 1 and EOR 1 exams.
Lauren Gilliam, Raymond Contreras, and Kelly Fisher, Indiana University Bloomington
Presentation Type: Poster Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Graduate/Professional Education
Professional Identity Development in Dental Students
This presentation compares the professional identity development (PID) of dental students to the existing knowledge of PID among dental students while providing dental educators with knowledge about the ways in which prospective dentists come to see themselves as part of the profession – particularly differences among groups currently under represented in dentistry. Currently, very few studies have investigated the relationship between demographic characteristics and professional identity in dental students. This knowledge is critical for meeting American Dental Association (ADA) goals for diversifying the profession and providing better oral health care for all. Institutional programmatic applications and student engagement in this research will be discussed.
John V. Moore III, National Board of Medical Examiners; and Brad Kovaleski, Community College of Philadelphia
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Graduate/Professional Education
Rating Nonacademic Professionalism Attributes and Behaviors of Physician Assistant (PA) Students
Physician Assistants/Associates are medical professionals who diagnose illness, develop and manage treatment plans, prescribe medications, and often serve as the patient’s primary health provider. Professionalism and ethics are essential competencies to the practice of medicine as a Physician Assistant (PA), are taught and assessed in PA programs, and are accreditation requirements. Currently, there is no validated survey tool designed for use in assessing PA students’ professionalism. The purpose of this study was to explore and identify the professional traits and behaviors desired of PA students at the time of PA program graduation, produce a set of key items reflecting these constructs for use by PA faculty during the summative phase of PA programs which provide program faculty and students with student professionalism achievement data, examine the validity of test content items for use, based on internal structure of the instrument, and reliability of the survey tool. A customized survey (ten-factor, 32 items) using a four-point Likert scale rating student competency was compiled and tested as a professionalism summative evaluation tool by nine PA program faculty across the U.S., representing all regions, to assess PA student professional attributes and behaviors. The ten professionalism constructs included ethical decision-making and values, communication, trustworthiness, knowledge of limitations, altruism, respect for others, empathic listening, honor and integrity, cultural humility, and interprofessional collaboration. The sample consisted of 310 faculty completed surveys rating student professionalism completed in November-December 2022. The percent agreement of faculty raters on a pre-pilot survey test case overall was 0.85%. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was conducted (IBM SPSS 28) to measure construct validity. Findings supported a five-factor structure, reduced from the original ten factor structure. The new five-factor structure includes ethical conduct, accountable communication, interprofessional collaboration, respect for others, and honor and integrity constructs. The internal consistency reliability of four of the new five factors (Cronbach’s alpha) was >.90. Low alpha on the fifth factor (respect for others) was attributed in part to low number of items loading on that factor. The PA student summative evaluation professionalism pilot tool is worthy of further study toward the development of a practical assessment tool for use by PA program faculty.
Stephanie Gilkey, University of Michigan-Flint
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Graduate/Professional Education
Using Non-Standard Results Scaling in Data-Based Decision-Making
All programs in higher education are exploring ways of collecting and processing data for impactful and meaningful decision-making processes. One research-based practice available to higher education is that of Non-Standard Scaling to provide sense of data from the professional perspective of faculty, staff, and administrators as they work through decisions related to program assessment and accreditation. Non-Standard Scaling incorporates the essence of qualitative and quantitative data forms and provides the opportunity to compare and explore processed data in the decision-making process. Non-Standard Scaling provides for professional knowledge and understanding to lead the way in exploring data of all forms.
Ray W. Francis, Central Michigan University; and Mark Deschaine, The University of Mississippi
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Graduate/Professional Education
Visualizing Data to Improve Student Learning in a Predoctoral Dental Education Program
The goal of Indiana University School of Dentistry’s (IUSD) curriculum assessment process is to improve student learning across the entire program, with a primary focus on vertical alignment. A triangulation approach is used to integrate several sources of outcomes data, including end-of-course evaluations, to identify areas of curricular improvement. Course evaluations not only have several inherent limitations documented in the literature, but also present challenges when the assessment goal is programmatic improvement. To address these challenges, IUSD created a dashboard to visualize its course evaluation data, which facilitates identification of programmatic trends and internal benchmarking.
Laura M. Romito, Jeremy Fry, and David Zahl, Indiana University School of Dentistry
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Graduate/Professional Education
We Asked, You Answered, and Now, We Present—Rose Squared
Institutions of higher education are facing a myriad of unprecedented challenges. The competition to curate the right-size incoming class (enrollment pipeline) of high-caliber students continues to be daunting for many academic institutions. As we race toward the upcoming “enrollment cliff” and endure the lingering academic disruptions of the pandemic, Rose-Hulman continues to seek ways to improve our undergraduate engineering value proposition. In this session, the presenter will share how assessment has played a central role in designing a new academic program that maximizes the academic credentialing of high-achieving high school students during their four years at Rose-Hulman. In addition, the conversation will highlight how the principles of Quality Function Deployment (QFD) and comprehensive academic assessment were used to develop one of our most active initiatives to build robust academic programming for our students, the Rose Squared (R2) program.
Craig Downing, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
Presentation Type: Keynote Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Graduate/Professional Education
A Multi-Year Mixed Methods Study of the Effects of the Tisch Scholars Program: Cultivating and Supporting Students’ Civic Leadership Skills for an Increasingly Multiracial Society
We will share an overview of one of the signature programs at the Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University, the Tisch Scholars program, to provide an example of how we utilize evaluation and assessment to collaborate with community partners and build sustainable community engagement practices. The workshop will include: 1) an overview of Tisch College’s mission and the different components that we offer to students and community partners, 2) an explanation of the Tisch Scholars program, 3) a summary of our assessment strategy, and 4) group workshop time for participants to think about their own assessment strategies.
Sunah Hyun, Brianda Hernandez, and Sherri Sklarwitz, Tufts University, Tisch College of Civic Life
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: HIPs in the States (High-Impact Practices)
Acquisition Advocates: Supporting the Student Experience through Times of Change
Since COVID-19, institutions are under increased pressure to lower tuition while receiving less state funding and recruiting from a shrinking high school graduate pool. With declining enrollments and other increased pressures, institutions are faced with closures, mergers, or acquisitions (Seltzer, 2018). This session will outline the acquisition of Wesley College by Delaware State University and its impact on the student experience. Presenters will outline student advocacy before, during, and after the acquisition. The audience will participate in brainstorming exercises, helping to prepare them to be student advocates in the event of a merger or acquisition of their own institutions.
Danielle L. Archambault and Christine McDermott, Delaware State University
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: HIPs in the States (High-Impact Practices)
Assessing the Efficacy of Communication-Intensive Courses as a High-Impact Practice
At Louisiana State University, faculty across the disciplines are expanding students’ access to communication-intensive (C-I) courses. The C-I course certification criteria includes all eight key elements of High-Impact Practices (HIPs), and could be considered a “mega HIP.” By embedding C-I within the classroom, we transcend the many equity challenges co-curricular HIPs traditionally face. In this session we share our straight-forward replicable model for assessing the relationship between C-I courses and graduation outcomes, and our future plans to expand this study to better understand the efficacy of this HIP at scale.
Ashley B. Clayton, Rebecca Burdette, and Victoria Lloyd, Louisiana State University
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: HIPs in the States (High-Impact Practices)
Barriers to Student Involvement in High-Impact Practices
What challenges must today’s students overcome to access high-impact opportunities? Here is an institutional-wide collection of student perspectives regarding opportunities taken or missed. Overall goals of the study are to determine barriers to student participation in HIPs and guide initiatives to promote inclusion. The study also includes National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) student engagement items for a detailed comparison between college and/or departments to institutional-level results from NSSE.
April D. Schantz and Holley Handley, University of West Florida
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: HIPs in the States (High-Impact Practices)
Creating Storied Learning Experiences through Project-Based Learning and ePortfolios
Julie Lindquist (2020) suggests that college faculty should question the idea that "teaching inclusively is (only) a matter of teaching 'about' diversity, rather than a matter of creating storied learning experience." A blend of Project-Based Learning [PBL] and ePortfolios can empower students to explore and experience storied learning on their own terms, while engaging with disciplinary-rich content. Hear stories from IUPUI students about the ways PBL gave them voice and choice as they developed discipline-specific expertise, then shared their work with authentic audiences through their ePortfolios.
Debbie Oesch-Minor and Michael Peck, IUPUI
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: HIPs in the States (High-Impact Practices)
Credit for Prior Learning as a High-Impact Practice
Credit for Prior Learning (CPL) and High-Impact Practices (HIPs) have been emerging trends in higher education in recent decades. Overlooked in their respective literatures are the intersecting methodologies and aligned focus on supporting priority student populations, especially returning adult learners. This session will provide lessons learned from the presenter’s efforts at strengthening CPL at two different Wisconsin Technical Colleges using key elements from HIPs to ensure CPL is ‘done well.’ This session will be beneficial for practitioners seeking practical ways to address systemic barriers to student access or to address the phenomenon of ‘lost credits’ in higher education.
Beau B. James, Madison College
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: HIPs in the States (High-Impact Practices)
Critical Perspectives on ePortfolio Learning: Preliminary Findings from a Qualitative Study
Research and assessment of ePortfolio has largely used theoretical description and quantitative methodology to assess the efficacy of ePortfolio learning in accordance with institutional goals. Few have sought to understand ePortfolio learning from the perspectives of students of color, considering how ePortfolio pedagogy serves to challenge (or maintain) oppressive learning environments. In 2022, a team at Ohio State started a qualitative study, exploring how students experienced a new campus-wide ePortfolio initiative that was part of the university’s revised General Education curriculum. This session will provide an overview of the project, present preliminary findings, and discuss implications for practice.
Teresa Johnson, Laura Struve, Zachary Hooten, and Imani Reynolds, The Ohio State University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: HIPs in the States (High-Impact Practices)
Development, Delivery, and Assessment of Collective Impact at a Rural Liberal Arts College
This highly interactive session will review a collective impact team model that brought together staff, faculty, students, and community partners in an attempt to coordinate efforts around pressing needs in a rural community that benefit both the educational mission of the college and vitality of the community, with the Community Engagement center working as the backbone of support for this initiative. This panel of faculty, staff, and students will share and discuss the process used to create the impact teams, lessons learned, team assessment, and continued challenges. A logic model will be shared that participants can adapt at their own institution.
Lauren R. Paulson, Hannah Hinterleiter, Isabella James, Sydnie Patton-Johnson, Rebecca Pechmann, Lainee Swanson, and Michael Williams, Allegheny College
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: HIPs in the States (High-Impact Practices)
Digging Deeper into the Quality of High-Impact Practices
High-Impact Practices (HIPs) are widely accepted as a beneficial learning experience. Yet, in the rush to expand implementation, we should expect benefits only “when done well.” This means addressing questions of access, quality, assessment, and equity. This session presents results from the NSSE HIP Quality Topical Module, launched in 2022, to gain a more nuanced understanding of quality. Findings about eight essential quality measures specific to three HIPs - internships, service-learning, and research with faculty - including differences by race-ethnicity and by major, new information about reasons students did not do a HIP, as well as implications for practice will be discussed.
Jillian Kinzie, Brendan Dugan, Robert Gonyea, and Tien Ling Hu, Indiana University Bloomington
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Advanced
Primary Track: HIPs in the States (High-Impact Practices)
Emerging Momentum: A Guided Conversation for (Re)Designing Experiential Learning
Are you opening a new experiential learning office? Since 2019, US higher education has seen over 100 new Directors and Offices of Experiential Learning. For good reasons, as EL leads to highly motivated students and transformative outcomes that connect to social and economic mobility! New arrangements of familiar activities are great, but how can this all work together under an EL umbrella? An expert panel from HBCU, regional, and Land Grant institutions explores new programs and reorganizations. We address theory to practice, equity, sustainability, assessment, and value to help you ask good questions when (re)designing experiential learning work.
Bill Heinrich, Orbis; Jennifer Dobbs-Oates, Purdue University; Mike Ducey, Missouri Western University; and Kristina Phillips, Jackson State University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: HIPs in the States (High-Impact Practices)
ePortfolio Assignments Support Application of Learning to Self
Providing students with opportunities to demonstrate knowledge through self-reflective writing enhances cultural inclusiveness. I describe the use of self-reflective writing in ePortfolios to support students’ integration of course content with their personal experience and to help them prioritize information that is personally relevant. My findings support the proposition that self-reflective ePortfolio curricula encourage writing, boost students’ awareness of learning, and increase the extent to which they believe course content is personally relevant.
Karen Singer-Freeman, Wake Forest University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: HIPs in the States (High-Impact Practices)
Evaluating ePortfolio Technologies Based on Your Institutional Goals and Values
ePortfolios are a high-impact practice and support students as reflective practitioners who have unique stories to tell about their learning journey while capturing assessment data. One barrier to beginning ePortfolio implementation is choosing an ePortfolio technology that is right for your students and context. This presentation will review the issues and questions that need to be considered when selecting ePortfolio technologies. With the guidance of facilitators, attendees will identify their local assessment and ePortfolio implementation goals and then apply a heuristic to ePortfolio technologies. At the end of the session, a collective list of ePortfolio technology assessments will be shared.
Amy Cicchino and Lindsey Ives, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: HIPs in the States (High-Impact Practices)
Fit Camp: A Community Outreach and Its Impact on Students
Childhood obesity is an epidemic. This assessment provides an opportunity for students to engage children in the community focusing on health promotion and its impact on the health disparity of obesity. Principles of health education, health maintenance, and health promotion are integrated into this experiential learning. This unique camp provides an interdisciplinary approach and is designed for children to learn about fitness and starting a healthy lifestyle. While in its development, a student self-reflection and survey will be administered regarding the student’s perceptions of future roles in health promotion and health disparity of obesity.
Samantha J. Fouts and Naomi Jones, Indiana University Kokomo
Presentation Type: Poster Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: HIPs in the States (High-Impact Practices)
Getting HIP to ePortfolios: Scaling Assignment-Level Reflective Pedagogies into Program-Based ePortfolios
A multi-disciplinary faculty group from a Michigan urban regional comprehensive university will share milestones of their multi-year plan to turn an intentional focus on high-impact activities in assignment design into the high-impact practice (HIP) of ePortfolios anchored within General Education. We will share findings from our study of signature assignments, strategies from scaling into an ePortfolio, and principles upheld in the design, including materials related to our HIP and ways we employed the guiding principle of equity-mindedness. We will model reflective practices central to our program and guide participants through reflective exercises to consider presentation themes, values, and implications for their own campuses. This interactive workshop is designed to offer practical tools and opportunities for planning in local contexts.
Stephanie Roach, Jennifer Alvey, and Kazuko Hiramatsu, University of Michigan-Flint
Presentation Type: Pre-Institute Workshop
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: HIPs in the States (High-Impact Practices)
High-Impact Practices in Online Education
High-Impact Practices (HIPs) are associated with a number of desirable outcomes for students, including greater retention, more engagement, and gains in critical thinking. Undergraduate research (UGR) is a hallmark HIP, and research generally finds that when UGR experiences include most of the essential elements, they are more successful and students report better satisfaction. This workshop will describe and review the eight essential elements of HIPs and present a framework for conducting undergraduate research online that incorporates these eight elements. Participants will have time to brainstorm ideas specific to their discipline and teaching context.
Sara Z. Evans, Kennesaw State University; and Jocelyn Evans, University of West Florida
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: HIPs in the States (High-Impact Practices)
High-Impact Practices: Evaluating Impact on Adult Learners' Retention
High-Impact Practices (HIPs) are expected to engage traditional and nontraditional student populations at different levels. As a result, student retention is expected to increase. At Utah Valley University (UVU), we developed a visualization dashboard to measure the impact of individual and collective HIPs on students' persistence and retention using propensity score matching (PSM). This study's findings describe HIPs' effectiveness as a tool for supporting Adult Learner students' retention and persistence. Compared to peers who did not participate in HIPs, Adult Learner students involved in HIPs were retained at higher rates.
Alaa Alsarhan, Utah Valley University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: HIPs in the States (High-Impact Practices)
High-Impact Practices: What, Why, and, Most Importantly, How?
Learn about the research practices that are providing equitable results for students, invigorating faculty, and creating a much more engaged learning experience across the higher education world. This session will be rooted in discussing scaling, access, and assessment of high-impact practices (HIPs). We will also share, and ask you to share, ideas for practical campus-wide applications of HIPs. We will share our tracking ideas, student surveys, tools for public demonstration of competence, and other online resources that support faculty. If you are looking for a high energy solution to some of the disconnectedness that has been plaguing our campuses since 2020, this is the workshop for you. You will walk away with real ideas that can be implemented at your college or university right away.
Jo Ellen Becco, Pikes Peak State College; and Robin Schofield, Community College of Aurora
Presentation Type: Pre-Institute Workshop
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: HIPs in the States (High-Impact Practices)
HIPs Burnout
The rush to create high-impact practices has led many institutions to create HIPs requirements, but find that poorly supported HIPs do not promote enhanced student learning or equitable student outcomes. As more institutions incorporate high-impact practices, personnel associated with doing the work/labor experience greater demands on their time. This session provides preliminary data from a national survey that seeks to identify, compile, and analyze the co-occurrence of high intrinsic motivation and the potential for burnout among higher education personnel designing, implementing, teaching, and supporting high-impact practices. We explore relationships among HIPs and labor practices at different types of institutions.
Morgan Gresham, University of South Florida St. Petersburg; Megan Mize, Old Dominion University; and Sarah Zurhellen, Appalachian State University
Presentation Type: Poster Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: HIPs in the States (High-Impact Practices)
Humanizing High-Impact Practices through Assessment
High-Impact Practices (HIPs) have often centered the experiences of traditionally privileged college students. Many have sought to make HIPs more accessible and inclusive to students of color, first-generation college students, transfer students, students with disabilities, and students from other marginalized communities. Despite these efforts, inequities in who participates in HIPs persist. Without deliberate and critical reflection, the way we measure and assess HIPs can aid in the reproduction of the status quo. This session will explore how changing the ways we assess HIPs can create more humanizing and culturally-responsive experiences for students. Participants will engage in a series of reflections about the specific context of HIPs at their institutions and learn strategies for creating more inclusive, humanistic, and culturally-responsive HIPs for their communities.
Heather Haeger, The University of Arizona
Presentation Type: Keynote Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: HIPs in the States (High-Impact Practices)
Instructors’ Experiences of Implementing First-Year Seminars in Saudi Arabia
To prepare students for employment and workforce needs, the Northern Border University (NBU) has formally adopted a set of HIPs. The current study aims at analyzing the experiences of the instructors about the implementation of First-Year Seminars. This study is a qualitative study that used a phenomenological research approach. The participants were 19 instructors selected purposively who were trained on how to implement and assess. Data was collected via open-ended survey. The results are positive, and the instructors report that their students are more prepared for college and more engaged in their learning.
Jehan A. Alandejani, Feras Almadani, Amani Alrumih, Awatif Alruwaili, Adel Hamed, and Roaa Mogharbel, Northern Border University, Arar, Saudi Arabia
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: HIPs in the States (High-Impact Practices)
Introduction and Evidence of the High-Impact Practices (HIPs) Spectrum
Join us to learn about our new expanded taxonomy of high-impact practices called the HIPs Spectrum that builds upon the foundation established by Kuh (2008). This new taxonomy has the potential to be paradigm shifting in the way we classify, measure, and study high-impact practices. The HIPs Spectrum expands beyond the traditional binary classification of HIP or non-HIP courses to a more comprehensive range along a continuum, which introduces High-Engagement Experiences (HEEs). Data results will be shared for outcomes across the HIPs Spectrum for underrepresented racial or ethnic minority, low socioeconomic, first generation, and transfer students.
Dianne D. Murphy, Heather Kaminski, and Kathryn Marten, University of Wisconsin - Green Bay
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: HIPs in the States (High-Impact Practices)
Leading by Committee: Fostering Programmatic Ownership of Assessment
Active engagement by programmatic leadership is essential to effective assessment. However, how do institutions foster engagement and ownership of assessment? The Artifact Review Subcommittee of Colorado Technical University’s Assessment Committee fosters greater understanding and ownership of assessment across university leadership. Simply requiring a touchpoint for assessment artifact selection enhanced the culture of assessment at the University. This presentation will examine this Subcommittee. Attendees will be able to: (1) understand the importance of artifact selection in the validity and actionability of assessment, (2) identify key elements for selection of viable artifacts for assessment, (3) enhance ownership of assessment across institution, and (4) develop artifact selection process.
Maggy Carmack, Jenna Obee, and Jeff Pizek, Colorado Technical University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: HIPs in the States (High-Impact Practices)
Leveling the Playing Field: HIP for Internship Attainment
Learn about one academic program’s use of high-impact practices to “level the playing field” to ensure quality internship opportunities for a diverse student body through an experiential learning event that matches internship-seeking students with committed employer partners. Now, yielding an internship is as much a learning experience as the internship itself.
Keely Floyd and Sarah Johnson, IUPUI
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: HIPs in the States (High-Impact Practices)
Pursuing Carnegie Community Engagement Classification Elective as a Small Institution: Capturing Robust Community Engagement Initiatives and Practices
This fast-paced program will provide a concise look at the steps taken by a small institution to conduct a self-study as well as tell their campus’s authentic story reflective of deep and pervasive community engagement—but at a campus lacking the resources of a dedicated Community Engagement Center and a fully-integrated software platform. Participants will learn steps for identifying strategic resources, capturing information, developing data, and optimizing the narrative that presents a genuine and robust picture of community engagement. The presenters are the co-chairs of the 2024 Carnegie Community Engagement Elective Classification application project for the University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee.
Sandra Stone and Jan Melnik, University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: HIPs in the States (High-Impact Practices)
Scaling High-Impact Practices through Institution-Wide Planned Change Initiatives to Foster Sustainability
If your institution is ready to scale high-impact practices (HIPs), but you aren’t sure exactly how to begin, this session may provide that nugget of information you have been looking for. We will briefly discuss a HIPs scaling scaffold template that may be molded to nearly any type of institution, as it includes strategic planning, involving the right people, and readying the campus community for sustainable change. If you are an administrator, HIPs committee member, or aspiring committee member, this session is for you. Data supporting this presentation is based upon a case study and the presenter’s experience.
Tammy L. Taylor, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Advanced
Primary Track: HIPs in the States (High-Impact Practices)
Self-Directed Learning in Relationship with High-Impact Practices
Andragogy is the study of Adult Learning. Both professors and students learn in the college classroom. When high-impact practices (HIPs) are incorporated into the curriculum, learning can soar. Yet during times of disruption, like COVID-19, adults continue to learn and better their practice. In this session you will learn ways to improve your own self-directed learning and how HIPs have a foundation that can remain steadfast during turmoil and change.
Rebecca Aslinger and Angie Wood, Chattanooga State Community College
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: HIPs in the States (High-Impact Practices)
The Way Forward: Reimagining Assessment, Innovation, and Equity-Centric Approaches in Global Higher Education
The purpose of this presentation is to highlight the state of education in a "post-pandemic" context. This keynote address will share findings on student mental health and well-being, and academic performance in global higher education. Dr. Jackson-Weaver will discuss high-impact practices and faculty development initiatives that she has spearheaded and oversees as the Senior Associate Vice President of Global Faculty Engagement and Innovation Advancement at New York University (NYU). What does the data show us about our current student populations? How do we normalize synergistic ways to leverage assessment, curricular innovation, and equity-centric approaches which lead to greater student success, belonging and authentic faculty engagement? The keynote address will conclude with reflective exercises and resources to develop a personalized action plan.
Karen Jackson-Weaver, New York University (NYU)
Presentation Type: Keynote Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: HIPs in the States (High-Impact Practices)
Using Comprehensive Learning Records to Enhance Equity in Student Learning
The IUPUI Experiential and Applied Learning Record (the "Record") recognizes valuable, assessed, and validated student learning experiences. The Record reflects in a validated and meaningful way learning, curricular and co-curricular, that occurs among various achievement categories (Diversity, Global Engagement, Internships/Career Development, Leadership, Research, Service, and Creative Expression). The learning is assessed by the program director or faculty member and affirmed by the IUPUI Registrar. This presentation will describe the origin of the Record, criteria for an experience to merit inclusion on the Record, and how the Record can serve as a tool to facilitate equity in student learning.
Thomas W. Hahn, Heather Bowman, Jerry Daday, and Patricia Turley, IUPUI
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: HIPs in the States (High-Impact Practices)
Using Data Visualization Analysis to Examine an Institution's Delivery on the Promise of HIPs
How can a campus determine the actual impact of educational activities believed to be high-impact practices (HIPs)? Researchers who identified the widely acknowledged list of HIPs later identified the essential elements of an educational practice that are likely to have high-impact, providing insight for exploring this question. In this session, one university will demonstrate how it is using the essential elements of HIPs as a framework to identify the range of its potentially HIP offerings, and, using data visualization analysis, examine the actual impact on student success outcomes and the variability of outcomes for student populations.
Pam Bowers, University of South Carolina; and Emma Morgan, HelioCampus
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Advanced
Primary Track: HIPs in the States (High-Impact Practices)
Using ePortfolios to Teach ePortfolios: Justifying, Simplifying, Streamlining, Modeling, and Supporting Students as They Build ePortfolios
Transforming our ePortfolio teaching tools is a vital part of reimagining and engaging students as they create and curate ePortfolios that bridge disciplines and reach authentic audiences. Faculty can model ePortfolio best practices through Instructional ePortfolio websites. Instructional ePortfolios can help students better visualize and understand the what, why, and how of ePortfolios. Learn simple strategies and practical tools that help students (and faculty) strategically design and build amazing ePortfolios.
Debbie Oesch-Minor, Sophie Carrison, Olivia Bradford, and Rachel Swinford, IUPUI
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: HIPs in the States (High-Impact Practices)
"When Done Well": Tools to Determine What Rises to the Level of HIPs
“When done well” is a common refrain in the research on high-impact practices (HIPs). In this session, a HIPs specialist will share tools grounded in research to determine when courses rise to the level of HIP. The easy-to-use benchmarks define each practice, provide a list of essential elements, and have a rubric to assess each element in course design. They allow the institution to determine which courses will be tagged and assessed as “HIPs done well,” and they inform faculty professional development. They have also been used to map where HIPs occur in the Academic Program Review process.
Tim Hathaway, Bristol Community College
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: HIPs in the States (High-Impact Practices)
A Journey through Institutional Change via Iterative Assessment
This presentation outlines 18 months of transformation for meaningful, equity-minded assessment praxis across career and technical education, Associate's, Bachelor's, English as a Second Language (ESL), and concurrent programs at a Dual Mission, Hispanic-Serving Institution. In 2021 we began the process of shifting assessment from box-checking and solely quantitative student data to iterative, culturally-responsive improvements in teaching and learning via a versatile open-ended five-question short form that focused on faculty’s learning and plans for improvement. This culture shift turned the spotlight of assessment away from deficit-based student data to asset-based opportunities for faculty reflection and improvement through the assessment cycle.
Abigail Crew and Karla Hardesty, Colorado Mountain College
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Institution-Wide Data Collection/Use
Accelerated Assessment of Sustainability Practices
A short timeline for implementing sustainability initiatives and assessments was ambitious but necessary. Navigating the communications with data-keepers and amending documentation led to an evolution of campus-wide assessment practices. What began as a small, quiet process of data collection, evidence-building, and documentation became a transformative change for the entire institution. This session will discuss emerging trends in university social responsibility, provide an approach to integrating the assessment of sustainability across the diverse units of an institution, explore the sustainability Culture, Literacy, Actions, Interpretation, and Responsibility (CLAIR) questionnaire, and provide an opportunity to discover innovative assessment practices while engaging an entire community in sustainability certification.
Amanda Karls and Nick Karls, University of South Carolina Upstate
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Institution-Wide Data Collection/Use
Assessing the Impact of Institutional Initiatives: The Case Study of Open Educational Resources
The assessment of institutional initiatives has many similarities to the assessment of student learning outcomes; however, there are also key differences. The selection of meaningful outcomes and enactment of aligned assessment methodologies are among the challenges one encounters when assessing such initiatives. This session will offer approaches you can employ when assessing the outcomes of a campus initiative and share case studies that highlight creative assessment approaches that revealed important outcomes of such initiatives. Open Educational Resources (OER) will provide a central example for the discussion. For this case study, assessment revealed that OER can serve to level the academic playing field by improving end-of-course grades, lowering DFW rates, and closing performance gaps. Attendees will leave this session with practical ideas regarding how they might approach the assessment of initiatives on their campus.
Edward Watson, American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U)
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Institution-Wide Data Collection/Use
Assessment Clinic Part II: ANOVAs, ANCOVAs, and KW, Oh My!
Assessment professionals are charged with collecting and weighing evidence to understand the most effective manner in which student learning is occurring. To do this, one must have a solid foundation of statistical techniques to know when to implement the appropriate test. These tests often include, for example, an analysis of variance (ANOVA), analysis of covariance (ANCOVA), or a Kruskal-Wallis (KW) test. Our session from the 2022 Assessment Institute: A Statistical Workshop for Examining Basic Group Differences, provided evidence that assessment professionals are eager to develop these skills. Our session will serve as an assessment clinic, or toolkit, for higher education professionals looking to expand their knowledge or gain confidence in completing statistical analyses between three or more groups.
Jeff Barbee, The Ohio State University; Ramya Kumaran, University of Illinois; and Daniel Trujillo, Auburn University - Harrison College of Pharmacy
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Institution-Wide Data Collection/Use
Defining High-Impact: A Qualitative Analysis from the Student Perspective
When do peak learning moments happen and how do different students experience them? In this follow-up qualitative study, peak learning moment data will be analyzed to compare brief student reflections from two distinct fields (the Built Environment and Human Sciences), furthering efforts to find practical applications of student self-reported learning experiences. NVivo software will support the thematic analysis of data collected from recent degree earners. Researchers will specifically compare how peak learning moments are discussed and reflected upon by graduates from the two fields, perhaps allowing for specialized definitions, and more importantly the development, of high-impact learning experiences. 2022 Research & Practice in Assessment (RPA)'s Best Scholarly Presentation Award Winner.
Kendall McGoey, Katie Boyd, C. Ben Farrow, Tom Leathem, and Eric Wetzel, Auburn University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginners
Primary Track: Institution-Wide Data Collection/Use/HIPs in the States (High-Impact Practices)
Expanding Access to and Awareness of Institution- and Program-Level Data to Address Equitable Outcomes
Data is an integral part of assessment. To develop a culture of assessment and equity, the university developed strategies to expand school, department, and program awareness of institution data on student outcomes. Along with improving awareness of data available at the institutional level, the university created new means to access institution data through collaborations between institutional research, academic program assessment, and student success offices. By ensuring schools, departments, and academic programs received data, the university was able to create discussions on inequity in academic outcomes, opportunities for programs to define key performance indicators, and evaluations of courses.
Lauren Schlesselman and Diego Valente, University of Connecticut
Presentation Type: Poster Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Institution-Wide Data Collection/Use
Hot Stove: How to Serve a Culture of Assessment for Improvement and Change
Developing a data-informed culture of assessment is not a one-size fits all approach but there are key ingredients that when mixed together can serve as an infrastructure for a wholesome culture of improvement. This includes a desire for change, collaborative leadership, a commitment of resources and a realistic timeline. Most institutions have some of these ingredients already baked within its core but how to leverage them takes much more intentionality. Alongside this is the need to make assessment less complicated and more accessible. Learn from leaders who have set sail on a journey toward data-informed decision making and growth.
Loren Malm and Charlotte Alexander, Ball State University; and Suzanne Carbonaro, HelioCampus
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Sponsor Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Institution-Wide Data Collection/Use
Leading with Data: A Model for Data Use in the Assessment of Academic and Support Program Effectiveness
A focus on student success, as well as on the ongoing improvement of the related data-use systems that inform decision-makers are key to the vitality and effectiveness of Morehouse School of Medicine (MSM). This presentation will showcase how MSM leveraged Title III funding to implement new programmatic data elements and to enhance the data-use capabilities stakeholders in this regard. Topics discussed will include: 1) the establishment of the MSM Enterprise Data Warehouse; 2) strategies for data integration; 3) use of data analytic/visualization tools; and 4) staffing structure that MSM employed to effectively use data for continuous quality improvement of its programs and services.
Mark Howse, Morehouse School of Medicine
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Advanced
Primary Track: Institution-Wide Data Collection/Use
Making the Most of NSSE to Enhance Student Learning and Success
The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) offers an important opportunity to solicit student voice on the quality of the undergraduate experience. Results provide reliable evidence of institutional strengths and data for research and institutional improvement and for telling an evidence-based story. In this session we will discuss NSSE and its suite of tools, including new Topical Modules and customizable options, and exchange ideas about effective approaches for using data to enhance student learning and success.
Jillian Kinzie and Leonard Taylor, Indiana University Bloomington and National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE)
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Sponsor Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Institution-Wide Data Collection/Use
Minor Cost, Major Impact: Improving Survey Response Rates Creatively
Surveys, questionnaires, and evaluation forms seem ubiquitous on today’s college campuses. Student surveys are often used as assessment tools in higher education; however, low response rates can limit their usefulness, and many survey administrations result in a low response rate. This session will outline the steps one college took to boost survey response rates. Efforts resulted in a 20% increased response rate compared year-to-year, and a participation rate that was 50% above the national average for the most recent administration of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE).
Tara Webb and Brian T. Dietz, Kalamazoo College
Presentation Type: Poster Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Institution-Wide Data Collection/Use
Technical Code-Switching Can Be a Superpower: Converting Complex Assessment Data into Approachable (and/or Audience-Relevant) Executive Summaries
Code-switching has emerged within diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives as the burden of changing one’s language, style, and presentation when interacting with different audiences. Being able to adapt and respond to organizational expectations are strengths that facilitate a greater organizational impact. Assessment professionals are fluent in data and statistical measures and must effectively translate their expertise into understandable, concise, and practical executive summaries for senior administrators. Knowing the audience and their needs is a superpower that assessment professionals at all levels should embrace as a means to demonstrate our strengths and value.
Paul Fina, Chicago State University; David Fuentes, University of Portland; Jeremy Hughes, Chicago State University; and David Weldon, William Carey University - Tradition Campus
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Institution-Wide Data Collection/Use
The Meta Assessment: Strategies and Tactics for Implementation
This session will provide an overview of a small college's journey in developing a meta-assessment process. For this session, the meta-assessment is defined as the process by which an assessment program is evaluated, and its effectiveness determined. While applicable to all institutions of higher learning, the topics will be highly applicable to those institutions with limited personnel and fiscal resources, and also address some of the methodologies and strategies related to building, conceptualizing, implementing, and utilizing a meta-assessment.
Bryan W. DePoy, Russell Sage College
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Institution-Wide Data Collection/Use
Using Data-Informed Decision-Making to Improve Faculty Experience with Assessment Reporting
As assessment professionals, we have collected and reviewed numerous assessment reports over the years where we ask faculty to use data and information to determine whether current practices (e.g., curriculum, pedagogy) are having the intended impact on student learning, and if not, to describe plans to address this. We don’t often assess the assessment reporting process itself. We will explore how Northern Illinois University has begun to assess the assessment reporting process to ensure that it is facilitating meaningful assessment rather than interfering with it.
Carrie Zack, Tawanda Paul, and Ursula Sullivan, Northern Illinois University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Institution-Wide Data Collection/Use
Using Student Learning Outcome Data to Inform Multiple Levels of Institutional Decision-Making
Demands upon higher education to collect evidence of student learning are ever present. Accrediting bodies and other stakeholders rightfully require that institutions use collected data to inform institutional improvement. This session will describe how Davenport University developed an interconnected system of student learning outcomes data collection and analysis and how that data is used to drive decision-making toward improved institutional outcomes. Specifically, this session will explain how general education learning outcomes data is tied to annual and periodic comprehensive academic program review, as well as how Davenport has leveraged this data to develop a general education outcome certification system.
Wayne Sneath and Mathew Devereaux, Davenport University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Institution-Wide Data Collection/Use
Xitracs™: Flexible and Focused on YOUR Data-Driven Future
Xitracs™ allows you to perform your institution’s assessment activities in a more streamlined and cost-effective manner. This presentation will give an overview of how Xitracs™ can help you and your institution's assessment and planning teams manage processes that promote institutional improvement, faculty engagement, and student success.
Stephanie Allen, Concord USA, Inc.
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Sponsor Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Institution-Wide Data Collection/Use
You Want Me To Do What?: Building a Culture of Assessment Post-Merger During COVID at a Midwestern Four-Year Land Grant Institution
Most institutions have undergone momentous changes in assessment during the last few years due to COVID. Our assessment revision story, however, starts earlier, as UW-Green Bay merged with three Two-Year Colleges in 2018, which necessitated a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) analysis of currently existing assessment processes and led to a rebuilding of the program. This interactive presentation details the opportunities and challenges of building an assessment program after a merger and in the midst of a pandemic, tools used to create new assessment processes, data analysis and comparison of the most recent assessment surveys, and strategies for growing a culture of assessment.
Valerie Murrenus Pilmaier, University of Wisconsin - Green Bay
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Institution-Wide Data Collection/Use
An Assets-Based Approach to Assessment at Howard University
Assessment can unintentionally reinforce practices thatuphold whiteness, such as key performance indicators, metrics, reporting, and accreditation, orcarceral logic, like compliance-basedassessment plan completion. These approaches prove to be especially problematic at HBCUs like Howard University. Recognizing this, the Assessment Team at Howard University developed an HBCU community-focused framework for institutional assessment practices to guide assessment strategies, techniques, and buy in for those within the HBCU landscape. As such, this poster presentation will reveal the core tenets of assessment used at Howard University to transform its culture of assessment, while also providing insight into tangible high-impact practices that have aided in our successful transformation. We welcome HBCU and non-HBCU affiliates to learn more about our assets-based approach to assessment.
Alexus Laster, Pavithra Suresh, and Taneika Thompson, Howard University
Presentation Type: Poster Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Leadership for Assessment
Archetypes and Assumptions: How Academic Leaders Can Maximize Personality Assessments for Faculty Professional Development
Academic assessment departments often integrate various personality assessments to help them increase employee engagement, promote leadership development, and help faculty and staff members grow toward greater self-awareness. The impact of these assessments varies toward these ends, and their successful use is often limited by a lack of time dedicated to effective discussion, inability to engage in a full debriefing, and challenges with potentially misusing the results in ways that create more harm than good. This session aims to provide useful practices on how to integrate these personality assessments to augment employee development, organizational health, and succession planning processes for assessment professionals.
David Fuentes, University of Portland; Paul Fina and Jeremy Hughes, Chicago State University; and David Weldon, William Carey University
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Leadership for Assessment
Assessment Grants: Use of Internal "Mini Grants" to Foster Continuous Improvement
In 2016, Missouri State's Assessment Office implemented a program of internal grants to incentivize the work and culture of assessment. We review the program's successes and shortcomings, as well its place in long-term efforts to build assessment culture.
Mark Woolsey and Mary Bohlen, Missouri State University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Leadership for Assessment
Assessment Institute Resources: Disseminations and Invitations for Professional Development
Extend the Assessment Institute experience by learning about opportunities to enhance your professional development. This session will describes our affiliated resources, including Assessment Update, an award-winning bi-monthly periodical from Wiley with a national readership; Leading Improvements in Higher Education, the Assessment Institute’s award-winning podcast service; the Assessment Institute’s book series with Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group; the Berlin 2024 International Conference on Assessing Quality in Higher Education; HIPs in the States; and the Assessment Institute’s Free Webinar Series, a 5-part, Zoom-based program featuring timely topics of interest to the higher education community. In this session, organizers of these activities will highlight themes from these various dissemination outlets and invite participants to engage with and contribute content to these resources.
Stephen P. Hundley, Jerry Daday, and Shirley Yorger, IUPUI; and Katie Busby, The University of Mississippi
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Leadership for Assessment
Assessment with Soul: A People-Centered Approach
While assessment leaders attempt to keep their processes focused on the people engaged in them, they are often sidelined by other competing factors such as accreditation standards, policy changes, or a new platform. This session will focus on the importance of keeping assessment practices centered around the people themselves, rather than the process or the platform. Participants will learn about innovative new ways to keep assessment people-focused, evaluate their own practices, and brainstorm ways to bring people to the center of their assessment processes.
Allie Michael and Amanda Wornhoff, Austin Peay State University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Leadership for Assessment
Collaboration for Success among Assessment and Institutional Effectiveness Professionals
Historically Black Colleges and Universities Collaborative for Excellence in Educational Quality Assurance (HBCU-CEEQA) is a collaborative that brings together assessment and institutional effectiveness professionals from HBCUs nationwide. The vision is to demonstrate the effectiveness of HBCUs by using best practices in assessment and evaluation by leveraging the collective expertise of assessment and institutional effectiveness professionals and other stakeholders. These collaboration efforts offer the opportunity to come together for networking, conducting educational research, and learning opportunities. This presentation will discuss some of the collaborative efforts HBCU-CEEQA has cultivated. Why are collaborative relationships essential? How can others build those collaborative relationships at other institutions?
Shontell Stanford, Morehouse School of Medicine
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Leadership for Assessment
Confirmative Evaluation and Instructional Interventions: A Case Study in Outcome Assessment and Accreditation
What happens when your outcomes assessment framework fails? Commonly, interventions are adopted, policy changes are made, and processes are retooled. More often, those interventions take the form of professional development. But how do we know that training will be impactful? How do we know that our assessment framework is effective? Join us for an in-depth look at how one higher education institution adopted a new outcomes assessment framework, offered professional development to support it, and then conducted a confirmative evaluation to measure its effectiveness. Presenters will share results and provide a framework for applying this at your institution.
Courtney W. Schoolmaster and Tian Luo, Old Dominion University
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Leadership for Assessment
Elevating the Importance of Leadership in Assessment and Accreditation
Anyone taking on the mantle of assessment automatically becomes a continuous improvement leader. While it is important to know the “how to” of engaging in sound assessment and accreditation practices, less emphasis has been placed on all the soft skills or rather “essential skills” needed to be effective in our roles as leaders. We often feel we are limited in our title/role, authority, and where we live within our institutions to impact meaningful change. Attend this workshop to learn and practice six essential skills/areas that will serve you in being impactful and effective as a true assessment leader.
Joseph D. Levy, Excelsior University; and Divya Bheda, Educational Consultant
Presentation Type: Pre-Institute Workshop
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Leadership for Assessment
Examining the Impacts of Assessment Peer Review Participation on Instructional Practices
A key component of our institution’s Program Assessment Reporting (PAR) process is the use of peer reviewers. Faculty participate in training and norming, review each submitted PAR using a shared rubric, and provide formative feedback. One goal of this approach is for reviewers to gain knowledge and skills they can apply in their own work. In this session we will share results of focus group interviews of PAR reviewers, examining if and how the experience impacted their instructional practices. Session participants will be invited to reflect on how they could incorporate faculty development into assessment and examine outcomes for participants.
Shari Ellertson and Teresa Focarile, Boise State University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Leadership for Assessment
Fostering a Culture of Evidence through a Community of Practice
Using an inquiry-based assessment framework, the Office of Institutional Effectiveness at the University of North Florida launched a Community of Practice (CoP) to support assessment and continuous improvement for academic- and student-service units through a consistent, yet flexible, structure and centralized support. In this session, we will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the assessment framework used, evaluate the structural components of the CoP, and provide data on how the initiative has shaped a culture of evidence. Additionally, we will provide participants an opportunity to discuss alternative structures and evaluate the feasibility of a CoP at their institutions.
Amanda M. Kulp, Samantha Feaster, Jasmine Graham, Jennifer Perkins, and Justin M. Sipes, University of North Florida
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Leadership for Assessment
Identifying Strengths to Build a Stronger Assessment Team
Personality assessments such as Strength Finders, DiSC, and Myers-Briggs are great tools for identifying individual strengths and weaknesses (Lambert, 2017). These assessments can be used to gain insight into the individual’s preferences, values, and attitudes (Lambert, 2017). Understanding the individual’s personality makes it possible to understand better how they will interact with others and approach tasks. Also, by understanding each individual's personality, team leaders can ensure that the team is composed of individuals with the right skills and abilities. This can help to ensure that the team is able to work together effectively and efficiently. This is the insight that can be used to build an excellent assessment team.
Shontell Stanford, Morehouse School of Medicine
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Leadership for Assessment
Implementing the Grand Challenges in Assessment Strategic Plans
The Grand Challenges in Assessment project is implementing national strategic plans to address key challenges: 1) Using assessment findings to direct immediate pedagogical improvements; 2) Using assessment findings to increase equity; 3) Producing visible and actionable assessment findings that drive innovation and improvement. In this panel, we describe practical ways campus leaders and assessment professionals can enact innovations that increase equity, speed learning improvement, and support evidenced-based decision-making on their campus.
Karen Singer-Freeman, Wake Forest University; Christine Robinson and Rebecca A. Croxton, University of North Carolina at Charlotte; Jessica Taylor, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga; Ciji A. Heiser, Developing Capacity Coaching, LLC; Daniel A. Bureau, Louisiana State University; and Sheri Popp, Weave
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Leadership for Assessment
Leading from the Sandbox: Applying Play, Inquiry, and Theory of Change to Cultivate Program-Level Learning Outcomes Assessment
In this session, we will be sharing lessons learned in redefining what assessment leadership looks like as reflective practice and demonstrating how applying play and inquiry theories are successful strategies to cultivate sustainable assessment fluencies and infrastructures. Key is using “conscious curiosity” in playful assessment activities that foster faculty-staff trust, engagement, and actionable program-level decisions. Taking an asset-focused approach, we are able to overcome barriers to change (e.g., legacy beliefs, deficit thinking, etc.). We will share specific play-based assessment activities we’ve done with faculty, and invite participants to join us “in the sandbox” for a group play-based example.
Sharon L. Comstock and Ben Schaap, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Leadership for Assessment
Lessons Learned: Adjustments, Changes, and New Beginnings - 15 Years into Assessment
Is assessment perceived as troublesome and tedious at your institution? Is it done only for accreditation purposes? If the answer is yes, come to our session and we will use our example to explain how we have gone from very prescriptive assessment requirements that helped us get through accreditation to a new system that simplifies the assessment processes for a final goal: to get more value out of assessment. We will show you lessons learned and our continuous journey to achieve assessment maturity.
Gioconda Quesada, Shawn Morrison, and Karen Smail, College of Charleston
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Leadership for Assessment
Leveraging Change: Promoting a Culture of Effectiveness
Change is inevitable, so the saying goes. However, people do not talk about what to do when there is a lot of change in a short amount of time. This presentation will discuss how an institution is building a culture of effectiveness after their mission, vision, brand, location, leadership, and strategic plan changed in a short period of time. The presenters will detail how communication and technology were leveraged to help stakeholders adopt the changes and embrace a culture of institutional evaluation and improvement.
Paula B. Blue, Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School; and Tisha M. Paredes, Weave
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Leadership for Assessment
Not a Game of Chance - Level Up Your Career through Thoughtful PD Choices
Webinars, conferences, workshops, retreats...oh my! Choose your own professional development adventure and learn how those choices impact your development and career. Presenters will also discuss the benefits and possible outcomes of each choice.
Tisha Paredes and Sheri Popp, Weave
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Sponsor Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Leadership for Assessment
Program Review: Purposes, Perspectives, and Processes
Program review is a widely acknowledged approach to improving quality in higher education. This workshop identifies the purposes of program review and examines its evolution and impact in helping colleges and universities improve student learning outcomes as well as co-curricular programs, research activities, and administrative services. Perspectives of faculty, chairs, academic unit leaders, student affairs and co-curricular professionals, research administrators, and other leaders will be shared, along with the important role of peer reviewers in serving as consultants and critical friends. Processes of planning for, conducting, and using results from program review will be highlighted.
Stephen P. Hundley and Associates, IUPUI
Presentation Type: Pre-Institute Workshop
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Leadership for Assessment
Shining New Light in Assessment through a New Center for Academic Excellence
The Center for Academic and Professional Enrichment (CAPE), a new initiative at a mid-sized private university, is dedicated to promoting academic excellence and providing professional development opportunities for faculty and staff. One of CAPE's focus areas is program assessment, with a goal of supporting continuous improvement and achieving university-wide impact. To accomplish this goal, CAPE implemented new approaches to assessment, including alignment with Quality Matters standards, continuous improvement of student learning, and impact on university accreditation. These professional development opportunities have allowed for deeper engagement in assessment and have helped to bring new light to assessment practices at the university.
Ute S. Lahaie and Amy J. Heston, Walsh University
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Leadership for Assessment
Tell Me What I Need to Hear: Applying a Leadership Communication Model to Increase Assessment Engagement
The assessment literature depicts the concomitant importance and difficulty of educator engagement in learning assessment efforts. While assessment scholars have articulated various effective strategies to promote faculty engagement with assessment at the micro, meso, and macro levels (Hutchings, 2010; Suskie, 2018; Ikenberry & Kuh, 2015), assessment professionals would benefit from communication models to guide them in actualizing these strategies with campus stakeholders. This session offers a leadership communication model, examples and evidence of the effectiveness of the model’s best-practice assessment communication strategies, and engages participants in creation and evaluation of communication approaches needed to reach diverse audience needs.
Kate Oswald Wilkins, Messiah University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Leadership for Assessment
Using Faculty Learning Communities to Build Institutional Capacity and Knowledge for Assessment
To support faculty and programs on their journey to becoming more effective in their assessment efforts, Middle Tennessee State University launched its first Faculty Learning Community (FLC) on Assessment in 2022-2023. The cohort of faculty met regularly throughout the year to learn about the design of effective assessment programs and applied their knowledge and skills in the (re)design of an assessment plan for an academic program. This session discusses the goals of the FLC as well as its implementation and outcomes.
Layne Bryant and Jeff Gibson, Middle Tennessee State University
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Leadership for Assessment
Utilizing Information from Assessment to Address Critical Institutional Vision and Mission Objectives: Teaching Excellence and Student Success
As educational institutions increasingly emphasize learning outcomes assessment, we need to understand and evaluate our critical institutional vision and mission objectives: improvements in student performance, teaching excellence, program quality, and accreditation requirements. Educational technology tools facilitate analyses of student performance data. These data can be used longitudinally to measure and reduce the gap with the intended results/goals set by the institutional vision and mission. This session will describe methods of developing systematic assessment plans, aligned with objectives at various levels of the institution, common emerging assessment technologies, and finally “closing the loop” by using assessment findings to achieve institutional goals with examples from a school of pharmacy.
Minakshi Lahiri and Carol Goldin, Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy, Rutgers University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Leadership for Assessment
Who Are Our HBCU Assessment Professionals?
Assessment practitioners fulfill a wide range of responsibilities. This requires understanding the institution, accreditation standards, objective data collection methods, and communicating results and solutions to demonstrate institutional effectiveness. This study compares and contrasts the assessment professionals at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) with the 2018 national survey of assessment professionals conducted by Nicholas and Slotnik (2018). Data was gathered across six themes: demographic information, assessment experience, the current balance of responsibilities, scholarship involvement, service activities, professional development, and motivation. The findings are valuable for institutional leadership, assessment professionals, the field of assessment, and new entrants into the profession.
Nadia Barnett and Ereka Williams, Mercer University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Leadership for Assessment
Advancing Lifetime Learning and Student Success through Integrated Planning
Integrated planning values stakeholder feedback and actionable data linked to goals that advance learning and student success. Ball State University has identified strategic imperatives to advance lifetime learning and student success, including expanding educational offerings to include non-credit courses for adult learners and customized training for employer partners. Learn from leaders who are putting these strategic imperatives into action through assessment and improvement initiatives which include pilots, envisioned uses of a new assessment platform, and ways you foresee a change in practice and in data to support your improvement processes and delivery.
Loren Malm and Charlene Alexander, Ball State University; and Suzanne Carbonaro, HelioCampus
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Learning Improvement
Applying an Improvement Cycle to the Work of Assessment Offices
For several years, the Office of Assessment and Accreditation (OAA) at the University of North Carolina Charlotte has coordinated a summer scholarship program which provides faculty members with financial support and professional development that guides them to develop a research project to analyze learning improvement at the course level. This year, we turned the mirror on ourselves, examining the impact of our professional development efforts. We conducted a survey where scholarship participants were asked to provide qualitative feedback about the activities and structure of the program. In this session, we’ll share what worked and didn’t work and how the 2023 summer scholarship program evolved based on the incorporation of faculty feedback.
Myra J. George, Mitchel L. Cottenoir, and Christine Robinson, UNC Charlotte
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Learning Improvement
COVID-19 Pandemic Impact: Comparing Undergraduate Student-Athlete Mental Wellness to Non-Athlete Peers
This study investigates whether student-athletes reported significantly different levels of increase in mental health concerns as compared to non-athletes. Using data from the 2021 National Survey of Student Engagement’s “Coping with COVID” module, the sample includes athlete and non-athlete responses from 7,274 first-years and 5,414 seniors attending 34 National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) member institutions. Using Ordinary Least Squares regression analyses, the relationship between student and institutional characteristics, athlete status, and mental health was explored. Findings reveal athlete status to be a significant negative predictor of increases in mental health issues, even after controlling for other student identities, experiences, and institutional characteristics.
Angela Miller and Chandler Hawkins, Indiana University Bloomington; and Lydia Bell, National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA)
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Learning Improvement
Deployment Strategy for the Readiness for Learning Improvement Tool: A Case Study Approach
Assessment professionals have been assessing students for over 40 years, but that data has rarely been used to inform improvements to student learning. The Learning Improvement Community was created to promote learning improvement, and recently created the Readiness for Learning Improvement Process Tool to evaluate readiness of a program. In this interactive session, we will examine the tool and discuss strategies for use. A case study from James Madison University’s Integrated Science and Technology (ISAT) program will showcase one deployment strategy. Participants will be encouraged to consider how they might use the tool at their own institution.
Laura Lambert, James Madison University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Learning Improvement
Designing and Implementing a Sustainable Assessment Process: Practical Strategies for Balancing Accountability and Improvement
The principal purpose of assessment is continuous improvement of student learning. However, in most institutions, the design and implementation of assessment and outcomes of the process are often linked primarily to compliance with external requirements such as accreditation and/or state mandates. This approach renders systematic enhancement of student learning and programmatic improvement as simple byproducts of the assessment process. This workshop will provide practical strategies for developing, implementing, and sustaining a systematic institutional assessment process aimed, primarily, at cultivating a culture of continuous improvement of student learning, while also addressing accountability needs in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Felix Wao, University of Oklahoma
Presentation Type: Pre-Institute Workshop
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Learning Improvement
Exploring a Practical Application of Program Theory and Implementation Fidelity with Assessment
Assessment for student learning can be enhanced by collaboratively integrating curriculum, instruction, and assessment. This workshop will explore cultivating integrated processes by practically applying key components of Program Theory (PT) and Implementation Fidelity (IF) to assessment practices.After briefly describing and discussing PT and IF as typically presented in journal articles, the workshop will focus on specific essential components of PT and IF, which emerged organically in an institution-wide initiative to foster critical thinking and effective writing. Attendees will apply these essential components to scenarios in different contexts for enabling component application and integrated processes at their own institutions.
Teresa Flateby, Higher Education and Assessment Consultant
Presentation Type: Pre-Institute Workshop
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Learning Improvement
From Data to Wisdom: Using Evaluation for Learning Improvement
A sound evaluation process is critical to produce findings and recommendations for the improvement of student learning. Evaluation is where all the assessment processes come together for review and recommendations for improvements. This session will demonstrate the elements of a good evaluation process that involves faculty and leads to the improvement of student learning, assessment processes, and curriculum integrity around desired learning outcomes. Examples of how the process can improve the quality of stated learning outcomes, curriculum mapping, and faculty engagement are provided. Participants will engage in identifying the important elements of an evaluation process.
Gloria J. Rogers and Robyn Hall, ABET, Inc.
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Learning Improvement
Humanizing Assessment Reports: What More Do We Need to Show or Tell?
By themselves, quantitative assessment results identify students’ performance patterns; however, they do not guide us toward identifying efficacious teaching and learning practices that improve students’ performance across our demographics, students’ contexts for learning, or modes of delivery. This session calls for accompanying quantitatively-represented program- and institution-level assessment results with relevant other internally accessible evidence that: (1) humanizes the realities, complexities, and challenges of the dynamic processes of teaching and learning and (2) deepens and broadens the processes of interrogating assessment results and recommending efficacious improvement practices in teaching and learning.
Peggy L. Maki, Independent Consultant
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Advanced
Primary Track: Learning Improvement
Making Assessment Useful, or: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Learning Improvement
Faculty understandably bristle when administrators and accreditors require proof that students are learning, especially when that proof seems costly and doesn’t clearly benefit their teaching. Learning improvement changes that equation. This presentation will describe how faculty successfully collaborated with assessment and development experts to implement a learning improvement initiative that enhances curriculum and instruction while generating useful evidence of student learning. The presentation will offer practical strategies for adapting this model to other contexts, emphasizing ways to empower and motivate faculty to lead, rather than avoid, assessment.
Kurt Schick, James Madison University
Presentation Type: Keynote Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Learning Improvement
Outcomes, Objectives, and Goals, Oh My! Negotiation as a Communication Strategy to Promote Learning Improvement
Even though the assessment of student learning has been a part of the higher education landscape for multiple decades, it continues to be a source of consternation and confusion within the higher education community. In our efforts to overcome the numerous barriers to quality assessment practices and learning improvement, assessment professionals negotiate, often shifting their language in an effort to clarify concepts to promote quality assessment practices. In this case study, we discuss some of the lessons we have learned in our efforts to move beyond assessment as an “accreditation-only activity” to creating a culture of learning improvement.
Cecelia G. Martin, University of Western States; and David Williams, University of South Alabama
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Learning Improvement
Program Theory and Implementation Fidelity: Critical Components to Learning Improvement
On their own, learning outcomes data have limited utility for improving programming. To facilitate learning improvement efforts, we believe two basic questions should be answered: “Why should this programming result in desired outcomes?” (i.e., program theory) and “Was intended programming actually experienced by students?” (i.e., implementation fidelity). We contend it is only after program theory is articulated that educators can collect useful outcomes data. Moreover, valid inferences from outcomes data are contingent on knowing what programming students experienced. This “expanded” assessment practice has potential to afford better-designed, well-implemented programming that could demonstrably improve student learning and development.
Sara Finney and Riley Herr, James Madison University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Learning Improvement
Setting the Stage for Assessment that Supports Self-Regulated Learning
Self-regulated learning (SRL) serves as a lens for examining teachers’ conceptions of assessment and their classroom assessment practices. Findings from interviews with elementary school teachers illustrate their perspectives on various forms and functions of classroom assessment. Teachers’ personal understandings of classroom assessment didn’t necessarily coincide with assessment environments optimal for supporting students’ SRL. Teachers saw themselves as initiators and controllers of assessment opportunities, prioritized attainment of content information, and valued written assessment products over practices that generate less-tangible data. These trends appear as consequences of the competing stakeholders teachers have to satisfy. Attendees will participate in a series of activities to reveal their own assessment and stakeholder priorities, and discuss how these priorities shape practice.
Carin L. Neitzel, Jean Lee, and Sarah Wareham, University of Indianapolis
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Learning Improvement
Exploring the Impact of Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE) Labs on STEM Retention and Career Development: A Comprehensive Study of First- and Second-Year Students
Funded by the AUBURNACHIEVE Bright Idea grant, this project aims to assess the effectiveness of the Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE) in retaining first- and second-year STEM students, including underrepresented minorities, at Auburn University. The project will use both quantitative and qualitative methodologies to collect data on retention rates and science process skills. Specifically, we seek to answer two research questions: 1) How does CURE influence students' career choices? 2) How does CURE improve underrepresented minority students' persistence in STEM at Auburn University? By providing data-driven interventions, the study aims to improve students' science learning and career development.
Min Zhong and Rachel Rotch, Auburn University
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: STEM Education
‘I Failed’: Student Meaning-Making of STEM Assessment Practice
Student voice in classroom assessment continues to produce promising outcomes in research and practice. In the context of STEM education and equity gaps that persist for Underrepresented Minority (URM) students: how can incorporating student voice cater to the needs of various student populations? More specifically, how do students make meaning of assessments in STEM classrooms? And how might these perceptions affect students’ motivation and STEM identity in a class? This proposed session aims to engage participants in discussion of the value of research that attempts to explore this topic, as well as consider tangible suggestions for understanding “meaning-making” in one’s own context.
Manisha Kaur Chase, California State University Northridge
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: STEM Education
Making Evidence-Based Decisions in STEM Education
Leaders in higher education today face a rapidly changing environment with significant financial, programmatic, and market constraints. Furthermore, changes to the demographics and preparation levels of incoming students often create challenges for both new and long-standing programs. Those whose work focuses in STEM disciplines are not immune to these challenges, and in some cases the technical focus of these disciplines makes the constraints even stricter. In these circ*mstances, it is critically important to ensure that high-stakes decisions are made with a focus on using appropriate evidence in order to make the right decisions. This keynote address will focus on generalizable lessons that can be taken from the speaker's experience as both Dean of Engineering at Valparaiso University and in their role as President of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE). It will focus on the benefits of using both qualitative and quantitative data to make the best possible decisions in an uncertain environment.
Doug Tougaw, Valparaiso University
Presentation Type: Keynote Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: STEM Education
Scholars and Leaders Program (SLP): Preliminary Analyses of Effects of Leadership Interventions on Underrepresented STEM Students’ Academic Motivation, Self-Efficacy in Major, and Leadership Self-Efficacy
Effects of leadership interventions on scholars’ academic motivation, self-efficacy in the major, and leadership self-efficacy in STEM are compared with the same measures for comparable non-scholars. Two cohorts are being followed from matriculation through graduation. All completed a pre-test. Annual surveys assess ongoing involvement in leadership activities. As expected, scholars and non-scholars did not differ on the pre-test background variables, nor on the target outcome variables of academic motivation, self-efficacy in the major, and leadership self-efficacy. Scholars reported more leadership activities and held more leadership roles during the previous year than did non-scholars. Post-test results will be reported.
Peggy Fitch, Central College; Lisa Hedrick, Ben Whitlock, and Jacqueline Wittke-Thompson, University of St. Francis
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: STEM Education
Students as Assessment Pioneers in STEM Education: Strategies for Successful Partnerships
An assessment pioneer emerged as one student served as the first undergraduate to contribute to STEM program assessment at a small liberal arts institution. This presentation shares the implementation of her Honors project focusing on the evaluation of learner achievement in Organic Chemistry I Laboratory. Some successes include the rubric design, data collection, thesis format, student voice and choice, and increasing student diversity in assessment. Some challenges include the Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval process as well as formulating a plan for continuous improvement. Collectively, these efforts describe the mutual benefit from student engagement to enhance student achievement in STEM education.
Amy J. Heston, Walsh University
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: STEM Education
Taking Advantage of an Unexpected Data Source
Access to disaggregated classroom data can be a challenge as some types of student work rely upon mixed formats requiring different grading methods. In Fall 2019, one faculty member at our institution began utilizing software to grade the work of 100 students. By Fall 2022, that number had grown to over 9,000 students. The new software provided a method of examining quantitative and qualitative responses to assignments. Our office initiated a collaborative project with faculty members to use this method to determine if responses differed by student populations and if areas of concern existed.
Mitchel L. Cottenoir and Christine Robinson, UNC Charlotte
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: STEM Education
Updates in STEM Assessment: Conversations with Leaders of the STEM Track
Join this interactive session to discuss, debate, and deliberation on the most important trends in STEM assessment. Leaders of the STEM track will facilitate attendees in discussing current assessment projects unfolding in various campus contexts, debating which assessment ideas, experiences and/or practices must be maintained, improved, or discontinued in the future, and the large group will deliberate on how to utilize this platform to educate and inform the future of STEM assessment practices. Attendees will also have the opportunity to engage in a unique discussion with the authors of the updated chapter covering this topic in the text, Trends in Assessment.
Darrell Nickolson, IUPUI, Wayne Hilson, Nazareth University; and Anne Weiss, Purdue University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: STEM Education
Using Data to Design Effective Supplemental Instruction for Developmental Math Courses
Math 103, Intermediate Algebra, at Calumet College of St. Joseph (CCSJ) is the last course in a developmental sequence and serves as a bridge to general education courses. This talk will explore how data drove the design of a successful Supplemental Instruction (SI) program to support students, increase student performance, and provide students with access to college success by preparing them for college level math courses. This talk will also explore several unintended benefits of embedding a credentialed faculty SI in Math 103 sections for both faculty and students.
Carrie Hutton, Amanda Copeland, and Colleen O'Connor, Calumet College of St. Joseph
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: STEM Education
A Mutually-Beneficial Partnership Between a Student Affairs Division and an Assessment Office: How to Create It and Sustain It
Our division of student affairs and assessment office partnered to enhance the assessment capacity of student affairs educators. The goal: to develop sustainable assessment plans that provide information about student learning. We will discuss how this partnership was implemented via direct consultation, structured educational activities (synchronous and asynchronous, in-person and online, small doses and large doses), and the sharing of relevant scholarly work. This cross-disciplinary collaboration was mutually-beneficial because it elevated the status of assessment practice. In addition to providing different educational resources, we will share realistic expectations for this partnership and how it is impacted by institutional culture.
Katarina E. Schaefer and Sara Finney, James Madison University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Student Affairs and Co-Curricular Programs and Services
Assessment in University Housing: Using Data to Improve the Residential Experience
University housing offices are implementing increasingly rigorous assessment methods to evaluate their work. This session will explore key emergent themes in the assessment of residential experience, including the shift to curricular models that seek to measure student learning, the challenge of assessing “living-learning community” outcomes, and the task of centering equity in residential assessment. The presentation will draw on lessons from implementing assessment methods at two large predominately white institutions, engaging in partnership with undergraduate student staff, and coordinating assessment efforts across a housing division that includes residence life, dining services, and facilities/operations.
Daniel E. Becton, Lili McGuffey, and Emily Schmitt, University of Wisconsin–Madison
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Student Affairs and Co-Curricular Programs and Services
Building Self-Efficacy and Capacity in the Assessment, Evaluation, and Research Competency: Studying the Impact of a Learning Community Model
The study examines the implementation of a learning community model as an intervention to enhance self-efficacy and capacity of student-facing academic- and student-support departments on the Assessment, Evaluation, and Research competency from the ACPA/NASPA Professional Competencies in Student Affairs (ACPA & NASPA, 2015). Utilizing a pre-/post-test design, we aim to see a change in self-efficacy and capacity as participants work throughout the year to design and carry out inquiry-based assessment. This session will provide a summary of the study, a review of the initial findings from the pre-test, and opportunities for attendees to engage with the content throughout the session.
Justin M. Sipes and Amanda M. Kulp, University of North Florida
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Student Affairs and Co-Curricular Programs and Services
Co-Curricular Learning: Who is Driving the Conversation?
Co-curricular learning is fast becoming a key component of the student learning journey. It enhances their curricular activities and fosters engagement if well designed. To date, co-curricular learning is tangentially associated with the student’s learning portfolio and may or may not be directly connected to specified outcomes for the program or student goals. Some accrediting bodies have begun to specify standards and guardrails for delivering and assessing co-curricular activities, while others have not yet addressed the topic. As institutions of higher education, it behooves us to create structures, assessments, and processes around co-curricular learning that better fit our students’ needs.
Chadia N. Abras, Bri Lauka, and Janet Schreck, Johns Hopkins University
Presentation Type: Poster Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Student Affairs and Co-Curricular Programs and Services
Creating Co-Curricular and Extracurricular Engagement Pathways for Timely Degree Completion
This study investigates which co-curricular, extracurricular, pre-college, and demographic factors contribute to timely degree completion at a large, public university in the southeastern United States. In response to a new state-wide performance-based funding model, the university is focused on improving four-year graduation rates. Analyses include a deep-dive into engagement trends and measures of success for Pell Grant recipients, Black and African American, and Hispanic students, as the four-year graduation rates for these subgroups lag behind their peers. The results will help institutions understand what engagements they should emphasize with different subpopulations that are nuanced based on a variety of factors.
Rebecca Croxton and Anne Moore, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Student Affairs and Co-Curricular Programs and Services
Does Personality Type Influence How Campus Involvement Contributes to Students’ Sense of Belonging?
While a large body of research suggests that students’ level of involvement on campus is positively associated with their sense of belonging, very little research has explored the potential role that extraversion could play in this relationship. This presentation will describe how students’ levels of extraversion associate with their involvement on campus and sense of belonging. More specifically, this presentation will also consider whether involvement in campus activities mediates the relationship between extraversion and sense of belonging.
Rachel L. Siefring, Virginia Commonwealth University
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Student Affairs and Co-Curricular Programs and Services
Four Considerations for the Future of Student-Focused Assessment
As institutions strive to provide the most timely, relevant, and responsive resources to address students’ needs, many professionals are advancing from using data to predict student outcomes to using it to prescribe specific interventions. This offers several opportunities for institutions to also ensure that data-informed strategies are thoughtful, efficient, flexible, and sustainable. This session will address current trends in assessment with a focus on four things that professionals should consider when using data to deliver student-centered instruction, programs, and services.
Amelia Parnell, NASPA - Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education
Presentation Type: Keynote Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Student Affairs and Co-Curricular Programs and Services
Improving Assessment Practices and Promoting a Culture of Assessment through a Year-Long Working Group
Assessment of student learning and development is essential to a thriving Division of Student Affairs (SA). However, training and experience around assessment often varies among SA professionals. To address the immediate need for professional development, an assessment working group was launched where participants each develop an assessment project in a supportive manner that removes barriers and encourages collaboration. Facilitators will describe the working group purpose and process, discuss barriers and lessons learned, present results of the assessment of the working group, engage with participants to support initial steps in developing a working group, and share working group materials.
Susan P. Farruggia and Daniel Wilson, University of Illinois Chicago
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Student Affairs and Co-Curricular Programs and Services
Journey to Assessment: Adventures in Student Affairs at a Small College
This session explores how one small college expanded and advanced their culture of assessment related to co-curricular learning. Presenters will discuss how student affairs aligned its work with institutional efforts, infused elements from assessment literature, supported staff growth, and addressed facets unique to student affairs work on a small campus. Although these efforts are still a work in progress, presenters will discuss the journey from an atmosphere of uncertainty and hesitation to one in which student affairs staff understand how assessment supports their work, improve student learning, and seek opportunities to further a culture of evidence on campus.
Brian T. Dietz and Tara Webb, Kalamazoo College
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Student Affairs and Co-Curricular Programs and Services
Progress through Partnership: A Cross-Functional Data Strategy’s Impact on Assessment
Some surveys are used as assessment tools (e.g., the National Survey of Student Engagement), but low response rates may limit their usefulness. To address this issue, one small liberal arts college created intentional partnerships across Student Affairs, Institutional Research, and Information Services to improve data-informed decision-making as recommended by the joint NASPA-Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education, Association for Institutional Research (AIR), and EDUCAUSE report. This partnership has increased response rates by 20% and improved the college’s data gathering, dissemination, and utilization for assessment, and this session will outline practical steps for institutions interested in implementing these recommendations.
Tara Webb and Brian T. Dietz, Kalamazoo College
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Student Affairs and Co-Curricular Programs and Services
The Case for a Co-Curricular Record: Advancing Student Learning Outcomes Assessment
Does your institution have considerable goals regarding co-curricular student learning outcomes assessment? Have you encountered barriers and challenges that are affecting progress? Exploring the possibilities for accomplishing your objectives through the creation of a co-curricular or experiential record could be very impactful, and also support additional institutional priorities. The Spartan Experience Record has created both short-term and longitudinal assessment capabilities for Michigan State University, holding value for students, faculty/staff, and the institution. This session will explore the what, why, and how of a co-curricular record, with narrative by Michigan State University regarding their process and implementation.
Sarah Schultz and Korine Wawrzynski, Michigan State University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Student Affairs and Co-Curricular Programs and Services
Using CAS Standards as a Framework for Continuous Improvement and Program Review
This session will provide an overview of how institutions may enact self-assessment and program review using the CAS Standards. These standards are provided for 50 functional areas, often found within the student affairs, student services, or student success areas. Self-assessment is the opportunity for a unit to examine carefully how it is doing at what it believes to be important. Using the CAS Standards can permit a unit to reflect on performance against nationally-developed conditions for good performance. Participants will be able to explain the value of CAS for use in assessing programs and services as well as describe the steps that comprise the CAS-recommended model for self-assessment and program review.
Daniel A. Bureau, Louisiana State University; and Robert Aaron, Northwestern University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Student Affairs and Co-Curricular Programs and Services
Actively Engaging Undergraduates: The Importance of Student Voices in the Assessment Process
Students can be active partners in the assessment process. During this session, the presenter will review a program that intentionally engages undergraduate students in assessment where student employees design, implement, analyze, write up, and present assessment projects. The presenter also will discuss successes and challenges of the program. There will be time for active engagement from participants to discuss strategies for intentionally engaging students as partners in the assessment process, to identify assessment projects that could benefit from collaboration with undergraduate students, and to examine ways to adapt the assessment program to meet institutional needs.
Jessica M. Turos, Bowling Green State University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Student Partnership and Engagement in Assessment
Cogito, Ergo Sum: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Implementing Student-Centered Assessments
During this session, we will share how we actively involve students in the assessment process to help them take ownership of their learning in Communication, Education, Environmental Science, Political Science, and Public Health courses, and provide examples of assignments that participants can use in their classes regardless of content. We will share our philosophy on assessment and what assessment strategies we use to engage our students in equitable assessment practices. We will engage participants in discussion on their current practices and how they could apply what they learn from our session to their own courses.
Joanne Philhower, Kadi Bliss, Kakali Chakrabarti, and Christine Mathenge, Austin Peay State University; and Kevin Baron, Siena College
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Student Partnership and Engagement in Assessment
Involving Students in Assessment: A Landscape of Opportunity
Students have long been the providers of assessment data to faculty and staff that are used by programs and institutions for improvement or accountability. Yet, this key stakeholder is often unaware of the assessment processes unfolding, their role within assessment, or the relationship between a more involved engagement with assessment and their own agency and learning. This presentation provides an overview of the landscape of opportunity spaces where students may be more actively involved and integrated into assessment processes and practices with examples and implications for equity, learning, and institutional improvement.
Natasha Jankowski, New England College
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Student Partnership and Engagement in Assessment
Student Partnership in Assessment: Ideas for Meaningful Student Engagement
In more than three decades of work, we are yet to regularly evidence a return on the investment of student outcomes assessment. Many adjustments to the process have been made (e.g., outcomes design, motivation, instrument design, faculty buy-in). Nevertheless, the key stakeholders, students, are rarely included in the process. Instead, we must—often incorrectly—assume the student experience and build our processes accordingly. To address this issue, participants will engage in a guided redesign of a specific assessment process at their own institution; intentionally planning for student partnership.
Nicholas Curtis, University of Wisconsin–Madison; and Robin Anderson, James Madison University
Presentation Type: Pre-Institute Workshop
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Student Partnership and Engagement in Assessment
Student Voice in Assessment: Collaborating with Student Assessment Scholars to Gain Feedback and Change How NSSE Data are Shared
The student assessment scholars collaborate with stakeholders on a variety of assessment efforts. This year, the scholars championed the adoption of students’ diverse perspectives for developing continuous improvement initiatives. One initiative, requested by Institutional Research, was a project to redesign the Lindenwood University NSSE webpage in order to educate, communicate results, and encourage participation in the Spring 2024 survey. During this session, our team will share the benefits of the student assessment scholars program for both the students and the university, the development of student voice in assessment, and our NSSE project efforts.
Robyne Elder and Aaron Shilling, Lindenwood University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Student Partnership and Engagement in Assessment
Students as Partners and Bridges in Assessment: Interdepartmental Collaboration for Improvement and Impact
By ensuring that an array of stakeholders engage in student-led assessment and improvement, the recommendations generated by students can be more actionable, stakeholders across departments can engage in conversation with each other and with students, and subsequent improvement plans can be more collaborative and impactful. Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Student Experience Team (SET) has successfully brought together offices that would otherwise be unlikely to collaborate regularly and has promoted schoolwide shifts in conversation, rather than isolated improvement efforts. Attendees will review and develop strategies for supporting partnership between students and stakeholders to increase the likelihood of meaningful, collaborative change.
Nicole Nash, Harvard Graduate School of Education
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Student Partnership and Engagement in Assessment
Student Partnerships in Assessment: A Live Dialogue with Students
Join us for "Student Partnerships in Assessment: A Live Dialogue with Students", a panel discussion featuring four remarkable students who have been integral to student partnership research at our institution. These students will share their first-hand experiences, learnings, and insights gained from actively participating in the research and assessment process. The discussion will dive into the transformative role student partnerships play in educational assessments. Together, we will explore the challenges, successes, and potential future directions of such collaborations. Don't miss this unique opportunity to learn directly from those at the heart of innovation in educational assessment!
Nicholas Curtis, University of Wisconsin–Madison; Bennett Apostol, Johnnie Brooker, Vanessa Wilkerson, and Paris Wooden, Marquette University
Presentation Type: Keynote Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Student Partnership and Engagement in Assessment
The Quality Assurance Academy for Student Reviewers: Lessons Learned from Two Years in Practice
Stemming from three iterations of an initiative to prepare students to serve as reviewers of academic programs, this session will outline how “Students-as-Partners” scholarship helped inform the development and transformation of a dedicated Quality Assurance (QA) Academy. The parameters of the Academy will be shared, the outcomes, and lessons learned will be discussed.
Jovan Groen, Western University
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Student Partnership and Engagement in Assessment
Toward an Equitable Bachelor of Music Assessment Process: Including Students in Student Learning Outcome (SLO) Creation
In the fall of 2022, we began the process of restructuring the assessment process for the Bachelor of Music degree. The goals are to make the process more efficient, meaningful, and equitable. In the spring of 2023, we used focus groups and surveys to collect input from current and past students about the development of new outcomes. In this session, we describe our process of using focus groups to enhance student voice in the development of learning outcomes and explain how student engagement in the assessment process can make outcomes that are more meaningful for all stakeholders.
Judith Ofcarcik, John D. Hathcoat, and Riley Herr, James Madison University
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Student Partnership and Engagement in Assessment
Trends in Student Partnership and Engagement in Assessment: A Dialogue
Formally, student partnership and engagement in higher education assessment work is still in its infancy. However, many examples of gold-standard practices already exist both in the U.S. and around the world. Join the track leaders of the IUPUI student partnership and engagement track for a conversation around the history, the current trends, and the future of student partnership and engagement in assessment.
Nicholas Curtis, University of Wisconsin–Madison; and Robin Anderson, James Madison University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Student Partnership and Engagement in Assessment
Using Focus Groups to Enhance Student Voice in Assessment
There have been numerous efforts in recent years to increase student involvement in the traditional assessment cycle. Enhancing student voice involves a shared and mutual process in which students become co-constructors of the development, implementation, and interpretation of assessments. Focus groups provide one tool that practitioners can use to enhance student voice in assessment. Within this session, we provide participants with an overview of the purpose of focus groups, question development, moderator considerations, and the analysis and reporting of results. We then address techniques for enhancing student voice in student outcomes, curriculum alignment, instrument development, analysis, and use of results.
John D. Hathcoat and Riley Herr, James Madison University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Student Partnership and Engagement in Assessment
What are the Odds? Predicting the Likelihood of Partnering with Students in Student Affairs Assessment Across Institutional Types
This is the second year of a research study for a dissertation that examines four different higher education institutions to determine which characteristics predict the odds of student affairs professionals partnering with students in student affairs assessment. Participants will learn how student affairs staff include students in the assessment cycle at the four institutions. Additionally, participants will walk away with a nuanced understanding of the institutional environment and its impact on student affairs professionals partnering with students in assessment. Attendees will be able to determine which results could be applied on their own campuses.
Chadwick D. Lockley, University of North Florida
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Student Partnership and Engagement in Assessment
Bridging the Gap: Enhancing Student Learning Outcome Analysis with EdVeu in Canvas LMS
In the process of academic assessment, monitoring and evaluating student learning outcomes has emerged as a pivotal side of effective assessment and learning strategies. However, the process of collecting such data often proves to be protracted and resource intensive. This presentation examines the transformative potential of EdVeu, a solution that seamlessly integrates with learning management systems, particularly focusing on Canvas LMS. By seamlessly weaving into the existing framework, EdVeu offers a robust reporting mechanism to track and dissect student learning outcome data meticulously. The session comprehensively explores EdVeu's role in bridging the divide between learning management systems and the intricate world of outcome analysis. Attendees will gain insights into an approach that harmonizes Canvas outcomes with fundamental analytics and reporting tools. The result? A campus-wide blueprint that measures student learning outcomes within specific programs and extends its reach to encompass general education and operational achievements.
Walid AboShanab, Lynn University and EdVeu
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Sponsor Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Use of Technologies in Assessment
Demystifying Data: Using Effective Visualizations to Support Assessment and Evaluation Endeavors
Data visualizations and dashboards help stakeholders realize data trends, identify relationships, and derive meaning so they can make efficient and informed programmatic decisions. While the use of visualizations to translate data are not new, developments in software and techniques have made these initiatives far more prolific. This session will explore best practices for presenting data in innovative and effective ways, share examples of dashboards created at our institution, and provide lessons learned from our data visualization projects.
Kelly E. McCarthy, USF Health Morsani College of Medicine
Presentation Type: Poster Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Use of Technologies in Assessment
How Educators Can Use ChatGPT: Should They Block It or Embrace It?
Educators have multiple opinions about ChatGPT, whether we embrace it or block it, and some of them already have taken the steps to block it instead of embracing it. However, it won’t prevent students from using it. The prevailing opinion about ChatGPT is to adapt it inside classrooms and make students aware of its features, as well as make educators change their mind about traditional assessment and start using authentic assessment instead. It’s important for educators to change their perspective in teaching and in assessment, especially with technology taking over nowadays.
Afnan Salema, University of Michigan Dearborn
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Use of Technologies in Assessment
Ivy Tech's Rubric Detail Report
In 2022, Ivy Tech Community College partnered with Instructure, the makers of Canvas Learning Management System (LMS), to develop a custom Rubric Detail report. We had several courses and programs that used rubrics as the main method of assessment. With many course sections utilizing the same rubrics, we needed a way to aggregate the rubric results and provide data at the criterion level for these rubrics. This presentation will highlight the new Rubric Detail Report and some of the analysis it makes possible.
Robert Morse, Ivy Tech Community College - System's Office in Indianapolis, Indiana
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Use of Technologies in Assessment
Liberal Arts Curriculum Assessment: A Meaningful Approach
This presentation describes a meaningful liberal arts curriculum assessment process at a small midwestern liberal arts college that is simple, minimally-intrusive, built on trust, and helpful. The process utilizes a user-friendly, web-based system (i.e., Liberal Arts Curriculum Assessment system [LACA]) designed and developed by the college’s Office of Information Technology Services to 1) make assessments submitted by the faculty consistent and standardized, 2) make the task of submitting assessments as simple as possible, and 3) make the quantitative and qualitative analysis and reporting of the assessment data easy. Benefits and challenges of this process are discussed.
Robert E. Beasley and Justin Gash, Franklin College
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Use of Technologies in Assessment
The University of Wyoming (UW) Assessment Matrix: Using Technologies to Advance Assessment for Student Learning
Through utilization of the UW Assessment Matrix, our Assessment Office has capitalized on piloting our dynamic curriculum mapping platform, developed in-house, to support meaningful assessment for student learning across the institution. The Assessment Matrix Pilot Program has afforded us the opportunity to thoughtfully inquire into student learning in six programs. This presentation illuminates a connection between use of technologies in assessment, faculty development, and leadership for assessment. We will share our Assessment Matrix story and engage attendees in a dialogue around using technologies to advance assessment for student learning.
Heather E. Webb Springer, Jake Hayden, and Francois Jacobs, University of Wyoming
Presentation Type: 20-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Use of Technologies in Assessment
Unleash the Power of Campus-Wide Assessment with Canvas Outcomes
Campus-wide academic assessment is a critical factor for institutional success and development. Measuring student learning outcomes on a large scale could be a lengthy process. During this presentation, you will be introduced to an approach to utilize Canvas outcomes with basic analytics and reporting solutions to develop a campus-wide process to measure student learning outcomes for specific programs, general education, or operational outcomes. This presentation will also share how to map outcomes to rubrics within the Canvas ecosystem, which will generate more data to see the big picture.
Walid AboShanab, Lynn University and EdVeu
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Use of Technologies in Assessment
Unlocking Institutional Effectiveness: Harnessing the Power of Integrated Tools
In today's complex educational landscape, institutions face numerous challenges in achieving and sustaining institutional effectiveness. To overcome these challenges, the integration of comprehensive tools has emerged as a vital solution. This presentation aims to explore the transformative benefits of integrated tools in enhancing institutional effectiveness. By analyzing campus examples, we will demonstrate how the Watermark’s suite of internally integrated tools can streamline processes, improve data management, and facilitate evidence-based decision-making.
Glenn Phillips, Watermark Insights
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Sponsor Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Use of Technologies in Assessment
Wrangling Canvas Learning Management System (LMS) Outcomes Data - From 2 Weeks to 2 Minutes
The Office of Collaborative Academic Programs (OCAP) at Indiana University (IU) works with 48 collaborative online programs delivered across multiple IU campuses. OCAP uses the Canvas Outcomes tool to embed program learning outcome (PLO) rubrics directly into course assignments. PLO data is exported via the Canvas Outcomes Report. After attempting complex manual PLO analyses using Excel, OCAP partnered with the Office of Online Education Decision Support team to automate outcomes analysis for annual assessment reports. We combined Canvas Outcomes data with existing university data sources to enhance and automate the process, reducing analysis time from 2 weeks to 2 minutes.
Allison K. Chatterjee, Chelsie Deatrick, and Vicky Gavin, Indiana University Bloomington
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Use of Technologies in Assessment
Wrap It Up! Student Self-Awareness through Technology-Enhanced Exam Wrappers
Unwrap the gift of an opportunity to grow student self-awareness and metacognition while elucidating classroom insights for faculty and institutional use. Reflective processes aid in student metacognition development and wrapper data informs faculty pedagogical growth. Presenters will discuss the methodology, benefits to students, and feedback automation approaches of exam wrappers from two institutions. Attendees will actively “wrap” up the session with the presenters and discuss ways to capitalize on this practice for broader applications.
Emily K. Frederick, Sarah Raake, Ben Stephens, and Terri Tinnell; Sullivan University College of Pharmacy & Health Sciences; and Ashley Castleberry, The University of Texas at Austin College of Pharmacy
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Beginner
Primary Track: Use of Technologies in Assessment
You Can Do It: Building a Low-Cost, No-Code Custom Assessment Data System
The complexity of assessment and accreditation requirements necessitate a systematic approach for collecting, storing, analyzing, and reporting student learning data. Although vendor-provided assessment management platforms are available, many programs and institutions cannot afford them, while also lacking the technical capacity to create their own assessment management system. In this session, participants will learn the basics of building a custom assessment management system using a user-friendly, low-cost, no-code platform. Although some technical acumen is helpful, this presentation is not limited to technology experts. Participants will leave this presentation with practical advice and ideas for designing a system of their own.
Andrew Palmer, Kent State University
Presentation Type: 60-Minute Concurrent Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Primary Track: Use of Technologies in Assessment
