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LSSU Course Assessment Inventory

The Shared Governance Assessment Committee works to assist academic schools and departments as they review and assess student and program outcomes. This inventory of Educational Effectiveness Indicators is a student-focused faculty-led self-study process conducted by the academic schools and departments.

The HLC defines Six Fundamental Questions related to Course/Program Assessment. These concepts underlie all assessment activities:
1. How are your stated student learning outcomes appropriate to your mission, programs,
degrees, students, and other stakeholders?
2. What evidence do you have that students achieve your stated learning outcomes?
3. In what ways do you analyze and use evidence of student learning?
4. How do you ensure shared responsibility for student learning and assessment of student
learning?
5. How do you evaluate and improve the effectiveness of your efforts to assess and improve
student learning?
6. In what ways do you inform the public about what students learn—and how well they learn it?
Purpose and Process of Course Assessment:
The school/department assessment committees will be given a randomly selected sample of courses to review. Information collected will be not be used for evaluation of individual faculty performance, but rather to aggregate and summarize across colleges or departments. Reports generated from this data might include the percent of syllabi from each college which have measurable student learning outcomes, or the percentage of courses which have linked student learning outcomes directly to the course assessments which measure them. Course information indicates only the subject and course level. While the assessment committee will know which courses they evaluated, that data will not be conveyed into the aggregated reporting.

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* 1. Enter the course rubric and course level of the specific course identified for this.

  Subject (select from list) Level (select from list)
row choices

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* 2. Does the syllabus for this course contain the required components of a standard LSSU syllabus?

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* 3. Does the syllabus for this course contain the following components of the LSSU syllabus?

  yes no
Header(e.g. instructor name, phone and office hours)
Required and recommended texts or materials
Course description (should match catalog description)
Course objectives (e.g. the student will be able to...)
General education outcomes (if applicable)
Grading system (e.g. what is evaluated and how it is marked)
Course policies (e.g. absences, athletic travel, phones)
University policies (e.g. ADA, online,
Tentative Course Schedule

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* 4. HLC Five Fundamental Questions - #4. How do you ensure shared responsibility for assessment of student learning? Select all that apply.

Course/Program objectives lead to defined student learning outcomes where evidence is collected to demonstrate student achievement and then student achievement results are shared with all stakeholders in order to improve learning and inform changes leading to institutional improvement.

Operational Definitions:
-Objectives are predictive statements of where you want students to be at some future time in their education (e.g. "we want all graduates in this program to understand and use the scientific method"). Objectives are generally less specific or measurable, but also can be written at the level of a learning outcome.

-Learning Outcomes are things you can measure at that future time to assess student achievement. Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs) are measurable and quantifiable in the sense that evaluation tools are used to assess student progress in achieving those outcomes (e.g. SLO#3 the learner will be able to construct and carry-out a scientific inquiry including the appropriate of variables and controls). Generally a course might identify several key learning outcomes - remember that the more objectives specified the more measures will need to be tracked to provide evidence of student achievement.

-Assessments include the tools you use to assess student progress in meeting the outcomes (e.g. rubrics, judging sheets, grades). In order to track student achievement of your SLOs, it is necessary that there be a connection between SLOs and your assessments, generally imbedded into the sylabus and reflected in the grading scheme. For example, "Lab 5: devise and carry out an experiment to study the effect of a toxic chemical on phytoplankton mortality - SLO#3".

-Evidence of student achievement in meeting the learning objectives can be reported out as course grades, as well as the percentage of students successfully demonstrating the desired outcome (e.g. 80% of students in BIOL105 during the fall 2011 successfully demonstrated SLO#3)

-Sharing of course assessment data related to student achievement of the student learning outcomes can occur at an annual faculty meeting where a discussion of course prerequisites, curriculum changes, and areas of focus for the coming year translate assessment data into program improvement.

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* 5. Does this course syllabus identify three or more measurable student learning outcomes (SLOs)?

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* 6. Are the course assessments (tests, papers, laboratory activities, presentations, etc) associated with (expressly or by association) to the stated Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs) for this course?

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* 7. Are the Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs) of this course aligned with specific accreditation standards or requirements?

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* 8. Are the Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs) for this course aligned with specific Program Learning Outcomes?

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* 9. What kind of evidence is used in this course to demonstrate that students have made progress toward achievement of the course Student Learning Outcomes? (Evidence would generally, but not exclusively, be reflected as components of the course grading plan.)

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* 10. Is formal evidence collected for all outcomes? Formal here means actually recording the evidence for interpretation and analysis (e.g. data stored on a network assessment folder).

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* 11. Who interprets the evidence related to Student Learning Outcomes for the purpose of course improvement?

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* 12. Is there a departmentally developed plan to assess student learning for all courses in one cycle (not necessarily a single academic year) of program review

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* 13. Is the School/Department using an e-portfolio or an assessment management system?

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* 14. How are the course assessment findings used?

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* 15. HLC Five Fundamental Questions - #1. How are the stated student learning outcomes (SLOs) of this course appropriate to your mission, programs and degrees? Select all that apply

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* 16. HLC Five Fundamental Questions - #2. What evidence do you have that students achieve your stated student learning outcomes? What types of evidence do you collect to demonstrate that students achieve your stated student learning outcomes? Select all that apply.

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* 17. HLC Five Fundamental Questions - #3. In what ways do you analyze and use evidence of student learning? Select all that apply.

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* 18. HLC Five Fundamental Questions - #5. How do you evaluate and improve the effectiveness of your efforts to assess and improve student learning? Select all that apply.

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* 19. As the individual completing the survey what is your role in School/Departmental assessment?

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