Assessing
Student Learning
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Section 1
Introduction
Welcome to a workshop designed to introduce faculty to student learning outcomes
(SLOs). The purpose of this workshop is to make developing SLOs possible and
practical in any course or program. Good assessment requires faculty with expertise
and resources to measure and report learning in a variety of courses, under diverse
conditions, about students with varied abilities and levels of academic engagement.
Higher education faculty members are hired for their discipline expertise. Training in
pedagogy and assessment often occurs on the run. Many of us emulate the most
effective faculty from our own college experience. But assessing student learning is
not new to faculty; we do this every semester as we evaluate student work. However,
meeting the assessment expectations delineated in the new accreditation standards
requires conventions beyond typical grading. The good news is that assessment
practices can make student evaluation more meaningful, benefit your teaching, and
improve student learning.
Campuses and classroom sections may require different strategies to accomplish the
same outcomes. This means that faculty must be both discipline experts and skilled
assessment practitioners. Throughout this workshop, we are going to model
assessment practices in the same way that you might use them in your classroom.
This means we have expectations for your involvement and work in the training, and
you should have expectations for those training you. In the end, you will be asked to
provide feedback to improve the training and determine how the materials can be
improved.
This workbook was developed by Janet Fulks and colleagues at Bakersfield College, 2004. The
materials are available to be used modified and adapted. Please credit references where they are
cited as they are being used with permission.
*Personal note. While I hope this material is useful to many faculties, it was developed to aid the
faculty of the 109 California Community Colleges and over 2.9 million students. For this reason,
material will often directly address the specific details of the ACCJC-WASC accreditation
standards and California-specific community college situations.
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Workshop Student Learning Outcomes
After completing this workshop material, participants should be able to:
SLO 1
Define assessment purposes and guidelines, and access appropriate resources.
SLO 2
Create a set of DRAFT SLOs for a course or program that:
SLO 3
SLO 4
SLO 5

Supports the faculty member’s teaching goals.

Integrates thinking complexity appropriate to the course.

Addresses at least two of the domains [cognitive, psychomotor, and
affective].

Aligns with program and institutional goals and outcomes.

Complies with professional standards and specifications.

Incorporates modifications through dialogue.
Plan for and implement assessment for the SLOs created.

Describe assessment data and tools.

Evaluate and select appropriate assessment methods.
Discuss, evaluate, and act on the assessment data.

Participate in cross disciplinary dialogue about assessment results,
outcomes, potential modifications and improvements.

Evaluate the changes needed in a course or program following thorough
reflection and discussion of the data.

Implement modifications to improve student learning, student
metacognition, curriculum or pedagogy based on evidence.

Create a public report to communicate the strengths and weakness in a
course or program based upon student learning outcome data.
Coach another faculty member to write SLOs and implement assessment.
Note - These outcomes do not occur sequentially. For example SLO 3 will require time, perhaps a
year or more, while SLO 4 can begin at any part of the process following the "see one, do one, teach
one" method.
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Getting Started
Take a moment to write down the best thing you do in your course or program?
Now discuss this with another faculty member.
How do you know this is the best thing you do? How do you know it is effective?
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“We want students to be effective communicators, to be
discriminating critical thinkers, to have content knowledge, to be lifelong learners, to have aesthetic appreciation, and so on. The problem
with goals is that they are basically invisible. How can one tell if
students possess these attributes? During assessment training
sessions, faculty members often say, “I can tell that my students are
learning because I can see it in their eyes.” This is nonsense, of
course, because the clairvoyance claimed by the faculty members is neither
reproducible nor transferable to anyone else. Hence, we need to do assessment
in order to figure out how effective our curriculum is at producing the desired
learning. But if goals are inherently invisible, how do we assess whether
students have actually learned them? The key is to assess visible indicators.
This means translating goals into associated, tangible learning objectives. In
order to make this translation, professors need to answer this
question: “What would you, a reasoned skeptic, need to witness
in order to be convinced that students were on the path toward
achieving the designated goal?” For example, if the goal is
effective communication in a chemistry student, then the learning
objective might be delivery of a speech on a technically complex
topic using jargon-free speech to a lay audience. The speech
would be an indicator that the student is an effective communicator and that
the curriculum is effective in producing students with this attribute” Dr.
Douglas Eder Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE).
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Assessing Student Learning in Community Colleges
Course Sections and Topics
Section 1 - Website Purpose and Introduction
Purpose of the Website
Introduction
Knowing What Students Can DO
Navigation of the Website
Course topics
SLOs for this Course
Assessment Tools for this Course
Strategies for Using this Material
Section 2 - Background and Rationale
Background Survey
What is Assessment?
Why Assessment?
Accountability
Accreditation
Educational Improvement
Bloom's Taxonomy
Diagnostic Formative Feedback
The Learning Paradigm
Prompting Learning
Quiz
Section 3 - Student Learning Outcomes
SLOs (SLO Benefits; Active Learning)
Defining SLOs
Defining Terms
SLOs & Objectives
Quiz
Sample SLOs
SLOs and Learning Domains
Evaluation
Section 4 - Assessment Tools and Data
Assessment Tools and Data
Quality Data
Assessment Terms
Standardized and Local Assessments
Grades and Assessment
Primary Trait Analysis
Rubrics
Choosing the Right Assessment Tools
Differentiating Tools
Creating an Assessment Tool
Your SLOS
Quiz
Section 5 - Course Assessment
Course Assessment
What do you assess?
Guidelines
Assessing Curriculum
Course SLO Matrix
Assessing Pedagogy
Assessing Prior Knowledge &
Misconceptions
Assessing Student Metacognition
Assessing Student Learning Outcomes
Curriculum Review and Assessment
Sample Course Assessment Reports
Section 6 - Program Assessment
Program Assessment
Setting the Stage
Defining Programs
Program SLOs
General Education Programs
Program Assessment Tools
Homegrown Program Assessment Tools
Program/Course Matrix
Program Review and Program Assessment
Sample Program Assessment Reports
Section 7 - Closing the Loop
Recording the Data
Using the Data
Budgeting, Planning, and Improving
Faculty and Administration Issues
Principles of Good Assessment
Section 8 - Implementing Assessment
Strategies for Implementation
Steering committee and Means of Training
Committee Structure and Budget
Assessment Audit
Campus-wide Logistics
Training Leaders, Selecting Materials and
Methods
Campus-Wide Training
Closing the Loop
Sustaining Assessment
Training Materials Evaluation Survey
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Assessment Tools used in this Training
This workshop intentionally embeds assessment activities in an attempt to
model assessment not only as a means to collect data, but also as a tool to both
engage students and teach material. Some of these assessment activities involve short
immediate feedback questions using a technique developed by Angelo and Cross
called Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs). However, while very valuable,
assessment of student learning goes beyond the short anonymous feedback techniques
used in CATs. Classroom Assessment Techniques as described by Angelo and
Cross’s are discussed in Section 4.
Some assessments within this coursework will involve self-evaluative questionnaires
to help you define your teaching practice. Most of these are quick surveys, linked to
online forms, scored automatically, and often provide comparisons with people from
the same and other disciplines.
When the inbuilt assessments ask you to discuss ideas or classroom practices with
other faculty - please do this; dialogue is essential to the assessment process and will
initiate rich professional discussions. As you talk to others keep the following things
in mind:

each course and classroom has unique factors

disciplines have unique language and culture

cross disciplinary conversations are invaluable

ultimately discipline-specific conversations best define student competencies

everyone is a learner when it comes to assessment

as professionals we are both guided and constrained by the principles of
academic freedom (see link to the right for the official AAUP academic
freedom policy)
When any activity in the training involves answers, information, or guidelines beyond
your own opinion, the answers or comments will be found in the appendix of this
workbook.
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Campus-wide Staff
Development
Individual Online
Course
Departmental Development
Strategies for Using this Workshop Material
There are many strategies for using this material including a website with links at
http://online.bakersfieldcollege.edu/courseassessment. Section 8 of this coursework
will describe more detail concerning strategies for implementation of assessment on
campus.
Resources for Section 1
AAHE American Association for Higher Education. (1992). Nine Principles of Good Practice for
Assessing Student Learning. American Association for Higher Education Assessment
Forum. http://www.aahe.org/assessment/principl.htm
American Association of University Professors (AAUP). (1970). 1940 Statement of Principles on
Academic Freedom and Tenure with 1970 Interpretive Comments.
http://aaup.org/statements/Redbook/1940stat.htm
Angelo, T. A., & Cross, K. P. (1993). Classroom assessment techniques: A handbook for college
teachers (2nd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass
Banta, T.W., Lund, J.P., Black, K.E., & Oblander, F.W. (1996). Assessment in practice: Putting
principles to work on college campuses. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publishers.
Nichols, J.O. (1995b). A practitioner’s handbook for institutional effectiveness and student
outcomes assessment implementation. Flemington, NJ; Agathon Press.
Poch, R.K. (1994). Academic Freedom in American Higher Education: Rights, Responsibilities and
Limitations. ERIC Digest. ED366262
http://ericfacility.net/databases/ERIC_Digests/ed366262.html
Wright, B. D. (1999). Evaluating learning in individual courses. Retrieved June 10, 2003 from the
California Assessment Institute Website. http://www.ca-assessmentinst.org/Resources/Wright2.doc
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