Moving Forward with Assessment

5th Regional Community College Assessment Conference

Friday, April 10, 2015 | 8:00 am – 4:00 pm

Regnier Center

Over the past twenty-five years, Dr. Thomas Angelo has served – often concurrently – as a faculty member, faculty developer, assessment specialist, academic administrator and/or researcher at several institutions, including: Harvard University, UC Berkeley, Boston College, the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE), Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand), and La Trobe University (Australia).

Tom Angelo has directed six university teaching and learning centers, four of which he designed and founded. Throughout, he has taught both undergraduate courses–in political science, freshman composition, teacher education and introductory statistics– as well as postgraduate courses in applied linguistics, assessment and evaluation and higher education. 

Tom has consulted on assessment and teaching and learning improvement in 17 countries, in all 50 of the United States, for more than 65 higher education associations/systems, and at more than 250 postsecondary institutions. He has also served as invited keynote/featured speaker at more than 90 higher education conferences nationally and internationally. Among his recent invited keynotes were the: 2014 Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) Summer Institute on Quality Enhancement and Accreditation; 2013 Council of Ontario Universities' Learning Outcomes Assessment Conference; 2012 Lilly Conference on College Teaching; 2011 EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative; and 2010 Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) International Assessment Conference.

He has authored or co-authored five books and more than thirty-five articles and chapters. His best-known publication is Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers, 2nd Edition, with more than 100,000 copies in print.

Tom Angelo earned his BA with Honors in government from California State University at Sacramento, a Master of Arts in political science and a Master of Education in applied linguistics–both from Boston University–and his doctorate from the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University.

Finding Out How Well Students Are Learning What We’re Teaching: An Introduction to Formative Classroom Assessment

By participating actively in this workshop, you can expect to accomplish five outcomes. First, you’ll find out what Classroom Assessment (CA) is, how it works, and how it can help your students become more independent, effective learners. Second, you’ll get hands-on practice using at least six simple, flexible CA techniques. You can adapt these techniques to assess your students’ learning and to help them assess and improve their own learning. Third, you’ll learn what experienced teachers identify as the pros and cons of this approach and benefit from practical guidelines for success -- dos and don’ts -- based on nearly a decade of field-testing. Fourth, you’ll receive materials and resources for follow-up. And lastly, you’ll be prepared to try at least one or two new ideas for assessing -- and improving -- your students’ learning.

Dr. Tom Angelo is Assistant Provost, Founding Director of the Center for the Advancement of Faculty Excellence (CAFÉ), and Professor of Higher Education at Queens University of Charlotte.

WORKSHOPS

KEYNOTE

DR. THOMAS A. ANGELO

Seven Levers for Higher and Deeper Learning: Research-Based Guidelines and Strategies for Improving Teaching, Assessment, and Learning

How much would you trust a physician, engineer, athletic coach, or nurse who did not keep up with and apply lessons from relevant research in his/her field? Or one who could not apply basic principles of good practice to new situations, with new client populations, or in using new technologies? Probably not much. Yet many faculty and academic administrators remain (relatively) unaware of current research -- in psychology, cognitive science, and education -- on teaching, learning, and assessment and on its relevance to our daily practice. This interactive session will explore seven research-based guidelines and provide examples of simple, powerful applications to improve teaching, assessment, and student learning in and beyond our (virtual and actual) classrooms.

8:00 - 8:45 am Registration and Vendor Fair

8:45 - 9:35 am Breakout Sessions 1 Dr. Angelo’s Workshop; preregistration was required.

The Data Is In: Building Hope in the Classroom Part Two (Regnier Center 175)Presenters: Jim McGraw and Connie Flick-Hruska, MCC-LongviewResearch suggests that the construct of Hope is a better predictor of college success than high school GPA, ACT, or SAT scores. Unfortunately, approximately 50% of incoming students have low levels of hope, and others do not know the pathways to implement their hope. Hope (i.e., a combination of “willpower” and “waypower”- pathways to achieve goals) is malleable, so we designed classroom interventions to build hope and faculty piloted them in Spring and Fall 2014 classes.This session will build on our presentation from the assessment conference last year with a quick overview of the theory behind hope and the classroom interventions we designed to build hope. We will present quantitative and qualitative findings from the completed Spring 2014 semester of the HOPE interventions in 24 classes (including some statistically significant results!) and formative data from the Hope interventions which continued for the Fall 2014 semester with 13 instructors in 22 classes.

National Benchmarking Institute – Maximizing Resources for Student Success (Regnier Center 145)Presenter: Lou Guthrie, Director, National Higher Education Benchmarking InstituteMaximizing Resources is the first national fiscal benchmarking project to examine community college costs and student outcomes in concert. This will allow colleges to align spending on instructional and student services costs with their priorities while considering their impact on student success.This session will illustrate how the principles of activity-based costing can be used in the assessment of programs at your college. The Benchmarking Institute is creating this activity-based costing framework with its partners at the American Institutes for Research (AIR) and the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems (NCHEMS).

From HLC to HCC: Sharing the Assessment Workshop Experience & Translating the Experience Into Action (Hudson Auditorium, Nerman Museum)Presenters: Doc Arnett, Director of Institutional Research); Michelle Hurn & Shelley Smith, Math Instructors & Co-Chairs of the Assessment Committee; Luke Dull, Music Instructor; Diane Hinrichs, Director, Wamego Location Members of the Highland Community College Assessment Committee will share their experience of the Higher Learning Commission Assessment Workshop held in St. Charles, Illinois. They will describe the pros and cons, offer advice for first-timers and share highlights and benefits gained. They will also describe the ongoing implementation of HCC’s assessment plan. Currently, they are primarily centered on transitioning the Common Learning Outcomes/Shared Performance Expectations from poster to reality. Development of rubrics and involvement of faculty and staff in the process will be key points. The session will be interactive with audience members participating in a couple of activities/processes that the team found interesting, useful and enjoyable. Caveat: We are presenting as colleagues sharing the journey, not as accomplished experts providing authoritative advice!

Assessment and Student Success (Regnier Center 157)Presenter: Christine MacKrell, Assessment Solutions Advisor, ETSKnowing whether students will succeed in college requires a holistic understanding of their strengths and vulnerabilities in areas that standardized tests alone can’t measure. Understanding factors like how well students manage their time and their level of motivation are important predictors of how well they will succeed. However, because these other factors often are not measured, by the time we understand what may help students succeed, it is too late. This session from ETS will present information on the SuccessNavigator Assessment, a tool designed to help educators gain a deeper understanding of first-year students in order to reduce attrition and improve success.

9:40 – 10:30 am Breakout Session 2 & continuation of Dr. Angelo’s Workshop

The Missing Link: Development of Programmatic Outcomes (Regnier Center 145)Presenter: Christopher Meseke, Director of Academic Assessment, Park UniversityWhile the development of course-level learning outcomes is a relatively well known process for most faculty, making the

connection to institutional outcomes can be a black box. In this presentation, this intermediate step will be considered, that is going from the course-level learning outcomes through the development of programmatic outcomes to the institutional outcomes.

MOVING FORWARD WITH ASSESSMENT

ACT Compass 5.0 (Regnier Center 157)Presenter: Tim Osborn, Client Relations, ACTACT staff will provide a step-by-step demonstration of how to get started with ACT Compass 5.0. Participants will receive information on system features including technical specifications, functionality, and system options not currently available in ACT eCompass®. Join this interactive session to learn about the exciting, new, state-of-the- art ACT Compass 5.0!

Assessing Online Courses (Regnier Center 175)Presenter: Regina Aye, Allen County Community CollegeAn interactive session that will explore the assessment of online learning at the course and program level. Share best practices, successes, and lessons learned with colleagues.

How to Conduct Effective Assessment When Nobody Wants to, They Can’t agree What to, but we Have to (Hudson Auditorium, Nerman Museum)Presenters are: Beth Baker-Brodersen, District Chair English; Bret Ross, English Assessment Committee Chair: Chelli Gentry, Director of Assessment, Des Moines Area Community CollegeThe history of a large community college English Department’s struggle to implement a district wide assessment program.

10:30 - 11:00 am Break & Vendor Fair

11:00 - 12:30 pm Keynote Address - Dr. Tom Angelo: “Seven Levers for Higher and Deeper Learning: Research-Based Guidelines and Strategies for Improving Teaching, Assessment, and Learning”

12:30 - 1:30 pm Lunch

1:30 - 2:20 pm Breakout Sessions 3 Dr. Angelo’s Workshop; preregistration was required.

GRIT, Hope and the First Year Student (Regnier Center 145) Presenters: Kimberly Glackin, Psychology Faculty; Kristy Bishop, Director of Institutional Research and Assessment; Melissa Giese, Senior Research Analyst, Metropolitan Community CollegeFaculty were concerned about student performance and overall lack of willingness to prepare for classes yet still expecting near perfect scores for their work. These concerns, combined with the impending completion agenda prompted a desire to explore why students seemed to lack the stick-to-it-ness needed to be successful in the classroom. Assessments were administered to first year college students to capture GRIT, HOPE and study habits. Student demographics were also captured. Results on these two inventories, as well as reported study habits, were compared to student age, GPA, grades, gender, retention rate, Pell grant, ethnicity, credits completed, compass, and ACT.

Assessment and Your Institutional LMS (Regnier Center 175) Presenters: Michael Rader, Associate Professor, Psychology, Johnson County Community College, and Vincent Miller, Director, Educational Technology Center and Video Services Meaningful assessment at the program level often means coordinating an assessment instrument and data collection across faculty and section offerings. The Psychology Department at Johnson County Community College launched a pilot assessment using the college’s new Learning Management System, Desire2Learn (D2L), in Spring 2014. This session will share insights on the pilot and the follow-up data collection from Fall 2014. The presenters will share information on the timelines involved; how and when to

involve key institutional players; lessons learned; and tips and tricks on how to make the process run smooth.

Assessment of Learning and Retention in a Two-Semester General Biology Course Sequence and Beyond (Regnier Center 157)Presenters: Lisa Felzien, Chad Scholes, Elizabeth Evans, Jamie Dyer, Ryan Elsenpeter, and Christina Wills, Rockhurst UniversitySuccessful introductory biology courses are essential for providing foundational knowledge, exposure to scientific thinking, opportunities to challenge high-performing students, and opportunities to cultivate learners with inadequate preparation. Assessing both learning and retention is critical for determining student success and persistence in science. At Rockhurst University, freshmen students considering a major in biology or related disciplines are typically enrolled in a 2-semester course sequence, General Biology I (fulfills general education natural/physical science requirement) and II. Since 2009, we have used a pre-test/post-test strategy to assess learning in general content areas and track whether students retain material learned in General Biology I through General Biology II. For this presentation, we have examined several aspects of our assessment: 1) the long-term trends between final grades and overall scores on pre and post-tests; 2) the relationship between assessment scores and student success; 3) the implications of differences in student performance on specific content areas; and 4) the level of retention of material in different populations through our upper level genetics and general physiology courses.

Structuring and Scaling Up Embedded Assessment of General Education Outcomes at St. Louis Community College (Hudson Auditorium, Nerman Museum)Presenters: Thomas M. Dieckmann, English Faculty, Joyce Starr Johnson, Director of Curriculum and Assessment, St. Louis Community CollegeDuring this session we will share our process for the creation, communication, and execution of the system-wide redesign and assessment of the St. Louis Community College General Education block, including best practices, early findings, obstacles, remaining questions, and future directions.

Beginning with an internal evaluation of the General Education block in Summer 2011, St. Louis Community College has undertaken a full revision of institutional General Education Student Learning Outcomes, curriculum maps, and individual General Education course profiles. These efforts have successfully involved substantial contributions from faculty and staff across the college. In Fall 2013, the college joined the Higher Learning Commission’s Academy for the Assessment of Student Learning, and faculty and administrator representatives developed at this time a communication plan to gather college-wide feedback regarding assessment.

2:30 - 2:55 pm Break & Vendor Fair

2:55 - 3:45 pm Breakout Session #4 & continuation of Dr. Angelo’s Workshop

First Year of Development of an Office of Assessment (Regnier Center 175)Presenters: Christopher Meseke, Director of Academic Assessment; Gerry Walker, Nursing Program Chair, Chair, Assessment Committee; Kenneth Christopher, Associate Vice-President for Academic Affairs, Co-Chair, Assessment Academy, Park UniversityWith the ever increasing emphasis on academic assessment by the NCA-HLC, there has been a widespread effort for colleges and universities to develop an Office of Assessment with a full-time Director of Assessment. In many cases, however, there may be a certain level of push-back from faculty, especially from Assessment Committees (a certain sense of territoriality). This pushback may be related to prior/ongoing assessment efforts or simply a lack of knowledge regarding the importance of assessment. The advent of a new Office of Assessment and director created the challenge to the current institutional culture and gained some forward movement in getting the work past the middle ground and closer to the goal of a designated assessment program with a coordinated plan to assess student learning and participation in program level assessment. Honoring the history and current culture while building a collaborative partnership with a long standing Assessment Committee was the key to forging a path of collaboration.

The Power of Predictive Analytics to Drive the Path to Graduation (Regnier Center 145)Presenter: Michael Moore, Sr. Advisory Consultant – Analytics, D2L, Ltd.Looking to understand how you can improve student success, retention and degree completion rates? Trying to

find a better way to identify early signs of academic risk or discover a student’s pattern of learning strengths and weaknesses? Want ongoing, academic advisement and planning tools that can help drive an adaptive and more personalized learning experience? Learn how personalized academic progress and mentoring tools analyze the big data available in your learning environment to provide Advisors and instructors with the critical data points that help drive to student success.

Apples to Oranges to Elephants: Comparing the Incomparable (Hudson Auditorium, Nerman Museum)Presenters: Sheri Barrett, Director, Office of Outcomes Assessment, Mary McMullen-Light, Research Coordinator, Johnson County Community CollegeA significant challenge facing institutions concerns assessment practices that have the dual purpose of engaging faculty in meaningful assessment work while addressing ever increasing accountability requirements. Key elements of effective assessment are that it is manageable, meaningful, and measurable. However, these elements don’t necessarily lend themselves to assessment reporting in a way that can be aggregated to respond to external agencies and requests. How do institutions address accountability calls while still engaging in assessment practices that yield robust and authentic assessment efforts and create a true culture of assessment? Johnson County Community College participated in a year-long project which invited faculty to contribute to the development of assessment practices that would benefit students and the institution and accommodate the need for aggregated reporting.

3:45 - 4:00 pm Final Thoughts, Wrap-Up, and Prizes

VENDORS FOR THIS YEAR’S CONFERENCE

FREE WIFI AVAILABLE

Assessment by Design

THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS:

A special thanks to Brightspace by D2L for sponsoring today’s breakfast.

A special thanks to JCCC Foundation for sponsoring the pre-conference reception.

A special thanks to Gravic, Inc. for sponsoring our follow-up surveys.

JCCC Bookstore

JCCC Hospitality Management Program

JCCC Office of Outcomes Assessment

JCCC Performing Arts Series

National Higher Education Institute for Benchmarking

Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art

Johnson County Community College has campus wide wireless and students/guests can generate their own access in a few short steps:1. From a wireless device, go to SETTINGS and select JCCC-WIFI. 2. Open a browser (Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox) and enter: www.jccc.edu3. Once connected, click on SELF-SERVICE (bar under GUEST WIRELESS). 4. Complete the name fields to generate a guest wireless userID/password to use while on campus.

Please make a note of your login information should you log off and need to log on again. This guest user access is valid for 24 hours. If on campus longer, generate a new userID/password for each additional day.