How Can My Department Respond to Assessment Data?
Course assessment processes are intended to foster conversations with faculty colleagues and administration regarding student learning. What responses and interventions are necessary to improve student learning, where needed, will vary depending on the course, department, and program. Below are a list of considerations that may help further considerations of where and how to intervene, when necessary.
Considering if Interventions are Needed
If there are any learning gaps (including equity gaps) observed in the assessment data, what practitioners, policies, programs, and practices may have a connection to impacting success for students?
What other questions need to be asked in order to remove barriers for students and address the gap?
Teaching and Curriculum Interventions
Course Outcomes
Are the course outcomes written in a way that is transparent to students? Transparent to faculty (what they mean and how to assess)?
Based on the outcome(s) chosen, were faculty readily able to assess with an embedded assignment that aligns with the outcomes?
Assignments/Assessments
What about the assignment design might be leading to any gaps? What unintentional barriers might be in the design of the assignment for some students and not for others? OR if no equity gaps exist but there’s noticeable and unaccounted for weaknesses in student work, what unnecessary challenges might the assignment involve?
Course Policies
In what ways could any course policies (scaffolding of assignments, modality of submission, retake options) support some students more than others? Or be hindering all students?
Broad Course Structuring
What questions, considerations, or ideas has this process brought up regarding curriculum sequencing within the course or within the broader program?
Are there recognized high-impact practices (typically involving significant curriculum redesign) that have come up or that might be considered to introduce into the course or refined in their current form?
Department and College Processes
Cohort and Department Collaboration
What has emerged as available resources for the faculty teaching the course and/or the wider department? For instance, what teaching approaches or collaboration strategies were learned from cohort or department collaborations?
What have you learned is a need within your department to support faculty collaboration?
The Assessment Process
What have you learned is a need within your department to support inquiry into student learning?
In what ways has the process refined your and/or your department’s approach to any part of assessment (planning, refining assignments, collecting work, discussing results)?