The remainder of this Monitoring Report sets out a plan
that is being developed and implemented to strengthen and revitalize the
assessment program at LCO College.
During the spring 2002 semester and prior to the posting of the position for assessment coordinator, LCOOCC proposed a planning grant to be covered under the National Science Foundation’s TCUP initiative. In August 2002, the college was notified that the proposal had been approved and the one-year grant funding made possible several initiatives designed to assess STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) programs. The primary goals were three-fold:
The grant funds will be used to purchase survey software and equipment to administer the project, including the Remark OMRÔ scanning system and web-based survey software, and to support the position of assessment coordinator at 50% as project manager. The activities of this grant synergistically support the duties and responsibilities of an office of assessment coordination and will provide valuable experiences and opportunities to refine assessment at LCOOCC.
With the hiring of a fulltime assessment coordinator, the College has made a firm commitment to revitalize, revise, and implement a program of student assessment. The new coordinator, as mentioned above, comes from an accredited four-year college that has recently closed due to financial reasons. As a faculty member in her previous institution, the new assessment coordinator has served as self-study coordinator and report author three times, as institutional researcher since 1997, and has coordinated faculty designed assessment days since 1997. Some of the initial analyses of the assessment program at LCO College presented in this Monitoring Report has been conducted and written by the assessment coordinator within the first few weeks of employment. As a Candidate for the Ph.D. degree in Higher Education at the University of Minnesota—Twin Cities, the assessment coordinator has access to scholarly journals on subjects germane to assessment of student learning in higher education.
Other experience includes an ability to operate administrative software, Univers. Having originally used ReportWriter to generate raw data files for importing into Excel and Access desktop software, she has also been an extensive user of ODBC after it replaced ReportWriter. Currently, she is using ReportWriter to obtain raw data from the Univers database tables. With ODBC, it will possible to seamlessly import tables directly from Univers and create complex data sets for further analysis and reporting much beyond the capability of the Univers “canned reports.” The coordinator, in her previous appointment, had conducted detailed studies on student retention in addition to being the IPEDS Key-Holder and the individual responsible for the completion of the Common Data Set survey since 1998. With this experience, the new assessment coordinator has already begun to incorporate data from the administrative database for use in the Assessment Plan and other venues of decision-making at the College.
Essential to the coordination of assessment in a course-embedded model is the ability to plan and track assessment activities with faculty. LCO College has kept up to date with computer and network access for all faculty members. When the Univers upgrade and ODBC are installed, there will be an unprecedented ability to prepare customized assessment forms seamlessly from the network. Until then, ReportWriter will be the source of data from Univers. Many Means of Assessment are keyed to items that appear in the Appendix. For many, simple redesigning of the existing forms would allow mail merge printing of scannable forms with automated tabulation possible after completion. The new assessment coordinator has experience with Remark OMR software that would allow greater ease of data collection by faculty and quick turnaround of the initial results. By scheduling the distribution of these forms during the semester (as opposed to the end of the semester), assessment has the potential of being ongoing and formative.
Since assessment is an ongoing process, it is critical to set aside workspace that is conducive to small group discussion and brainstorming. Also necessary is the secure filing space for artifacts and other documents that constitute the raw data of assessment. To this end, LCO College has made available office space large enough to accommodate a round table for meetings, filing cabinets (13 drawers at present), and a dry-erase white board in addition to the desk and computer workstation for the assessment coordinator. This new area has been networked and the new coordinator is supplying it with references on assessment, accreditation, teaching/learning, and other resources on higher education. Adjacent to the Office of Assessment Coordination is a space dedicated to resources supporting the self-study for the comprehensive evaluation in 2004.
With the revitalization of Assessment at LCO College, not
only is it critical to have faculty members who were here in 1999 to inform and
update the assessment coordinator regarding the actual status of assessment,
faculty turnover makes it necessary to develop and train all faculty on an
ongoing basis. To meet these needs, the Fall Orientation for Faculty and Staff
has launched the self-study and has folded in assessment during the two days
devoted to orientation. Because the College is beginning its self-study process
for the comprehensive evaluation in 2004, there will be a synergism on campus
that will set the context of assessment within the framework of the Higher
Learning Commission’s Criterion Three.
Planning is currently underway for the self-study process. The new assessment coordinator, because of her experience with self-study, has introduced faculty and staff to accreditation by presenting an overview. This was immediately followed by a distribution of a survey to all faculty and staff. The survey, scannable in Remark OMR, will help define clustered groups of individuals with similar interests. The PowerPoint handouts prepared by the new assessment coordinator and a sample of the scannable survey are provided in the appendix. It should be noted and emphasized that the new assessment coordinator will not be the self-study coordinator.
To meet the needs of further assessment program
development, the new assessment coordinator has written a web site in FrontPageÔ
that has several pages pertinent to assessment. The 1999 Plan and the 2000
Continuous Improvement Plan are included and hyperlinked to allow ease of
navigation and location of specific rubrics identified in the matrices. There is
one page devoted to Internet resources on assessment and another page presents a
list of assessment plans that are available at other institutions of higher
education. Currently, the page will need to be approved through the appropriate
channels before it goes up on the network. A CD is included that has the
Assessment Web Pages in draft format.
Because all faculty and staff are networked with Internet, they will have instant access to the 1999 Plan, the 2000 Continuous Improvement Plan and hyperlinked resources. Other documents will be added as electronic versions are made available. During Orientation, the assessment coordinator demonstrated the draft version of the Assessment Web Pages. A beta version has been placed in a public folder for testing by individuals on campus.
The 1999 Plan has a series of nineteen different forms keyed to the outcomes in both general education and program assessment. To streamline data collection, the new assessment coordinator will redesign some of the forms to be scannable in Remark OMR software. By having an easily marked scoring rubric or a checklist formatted for faculty use, data collection will be less burdensome and allow quick turnaround for feedback to students and faculty. This will increase the utility of assessment results. Additionally, Remark OMR allows seamless importing into a desktop database or spreadsheet, thus making possible tracking of student outcomes over time.
As mentioned above, the new assessment coordinator had had
institutional research experience with Univers. This makes possible several data
studies that will provide useful information for faculty and administration.
Student enrollment studies have already been completed that depict the patterns
of attendance, success and failure, migration across degree programs and
certificate programs. These reports will help addresses concerns of retention
and advising. A copy of this large report set and a key to the mock ID numbers
have been provided to the appropriate individuals for the purposes of contacting
students who have left the college. Ongoing course section studies provide
evidence of curriculum effectiveness as well as student completion and
performance in the class.
Additionally, as syllabi continue to improve and objectives are listed and keyed to assessment means, a desktop database will be developed to schedule and track course-embedded assessment outcomes. These data can be dynamically linked to the administrative database through ODBC when it becomes available. Until then, ReportWriter is being used to obtain “frozen” data from Univers. There exists a potential to answer many questions regarding student attendance, retention, attrition, etc. based on the data available on campus.