Levels of Assessment in CHFA
The CHFA Student Outcomes Assessment Process focuses on Program Assessment that will prepare CHFA for Institutional Assessment. Assessment, however, is multi-dimensional. Assessment processes in which faculty already engage (in the classroom and in their courses) link with the larger assessment process.
Classroom Assessment:
An exercise or activity selected or designed by the individual instructor to discover what students are learning or if students are learning what was intended in a single class meetings or in a small number of consecutive class meetings. The instructor evaluates the results to decide if changes are needed in future class meetings. A typical question addressed by the assessment is: Did students learn what I intended them to learn today?
Course Assessment:
Activities selected by faculty members who teach a course to discover if students are learning what those faculty members intend as a result of taking that given course. Those instructors--occasionally a group of instructors sharing a common course--decide if the results require changes in the course to improve student learning. The typical questions addressed by course assessment are: Do students taking the course learn what we, the faculty who teach it, intend them to learn and acquire the skills, attitudes, and competencies which we intend for them to have at the end of the course?
Program Assessment:
Activities identified by faculty members of a program that measure three or more of the many goals for learning (with supporting outcomes) intended by that program. Typical program assessment questions are: Have our Seniors met our goals for their learning? Have we used evidence of learning collected during assessment to improve our curriculum in order to enhance student learning? Can most of our graduates find employment in the field? Are our graduates and their employers satisfied with our graduates' knowledge, skills, and attitudes? Program assessment results are recorded yearly in CHFA departmental annual reports. They are summarized every seven years in UNI Program Reviews.
Institutional Assessment:
Our accrediting agency, the North Central Association (Higher Learning Commission), reviews the collective effect of program assessment processes on student learning at UNI. The questions that the NCA will ask when their representatives visit our campus (and on which our campus self-study will report) are: How are your stated student learning outcomes appropriate to your mission, program, and degrees? What evidence do you have that students are achieving your stated learning outcomes? In what ways do you analyze and use evidence of student learning? How do you ensure shared responsibility for assessment of student learning? How do you evaluate and improve the effectiveness of your efforts to assess and improve student learning? Because CHFA SOA questions (in our departmental SOA annual reports) already correlate with these NCA questions, no extra preparation will be required to ready CHFA programs for an NCA visit.
Handout inspired by: http://www.stlcc.cc.mo.us/assessment/text/vocab.html
