HLC Assessment Workshop

Hello, Everyone!
Spring was a very busy time for assessment and technology projects, and I stopped blogging for a while.  I am back now, and I would like to describe a few workshops and conferences I attended.

The first one is the HLC Workshop “Emerging Leaders in Assessment.”  The workshop was held in St. Charles, IL on May 14-15.  HLC is the Midwest accrediting agency for higher education – the Higher Learning Commission.  The HLC sets standards for academic quality, and its team of reviewers read the university’s accreditation report and determine if the school will be accredited.  This workshop provided information about academic assessment processes.

Here are my name plate and my badge from the event:

 

Day 1

Workshop content was divided into two days.  On the first day, we learned a lot of vocabulary and basic information about student learning outcomes, performance indicators, the differences between course-level and program-level assessment, curriculum maps, assessment plans, and assessment strategies.

Honestly, I did not enjoy the first day.  I consider myself a very advanced assessment expert now, and I found the Day 1 material to be very beginner-level, and the lecture format of the session made it very un-engaging.  During the whole first day, I was thinking, “I know how to develop assessment plans,” “I know how to write and read and help others write assessment reports,” “I know the differences between the Bloom’s terms.”  During this day, my responses to the material made me feel like I was in the wrong training session… as if the workshop was not really for “emerging leaders.”

However, I did enjoy a couple activities we started on the first day.  One of these was a group activity where we selected an outcome and wrote student learning indicators.  Our group selected “interpersonal communication skills,” and we wrote four or five indicators that could measure how well the student was mastering the material.  On the second day, we built on this activity by adding benchmarks and by developing rubrics with different performance levels.  This activity was very useful because it made us confront and discuss many higher-level issues I wanted to talk about.

Another activity we started on the first day was a learning journal and a self-assessment worksheet.  The learning journal was a personal journal where we could record notes, questions, observations, and anything else that helped us learn.  I used my journal to reflect on assessment practices at my school and to write ideas that could help us improve our assessment practices.

One observation I made in my reflective journal was that some programs write “action strategies” rather “student performance indicators.”  For example, service-oriented programs sometimes have outcomes like “engage with professional organizations.”  I learned that is not an outcome.  Instead, it is a strategy for achieving that outcome.  Joining a professional organization is not something students learn; instead, it is something students do in order to learn.  To revise, the outcome would need to be something like “maintain an awareness of current trends in the profession” or “participate in life-long learning.”  Joining a professional organization can be a strategy for achieving those learning outcomes.

Some programs write performance strategies instead of student learning outcomes.  These are not the same.  An outcome describes what a student should know or be able to do.  A strategy is a method that promotes learning and helps students demonstrate they have achieved the learning outcome.

Here is another example.  In Business Accounting and Finance programs, a student learning outcome may say “create a financial statement.”  Again, the creation of a financial statement is not a learning goal.  Instead, it is a strategy for demonstrating that a student has learned financial and accounting principles.  So, the outcome can be revised to something like “demonstrate financial understanding,” and the creation of a financial statement would be a strategy for demonstrating financial understanding.

This was an important reflection activity for me because I have seen several outcomes like the financial statement outcome where the learning goal was written as a performance strategy.

The other reflective activity was a self-assessment worksheet.  This worksheet asked questions about workshop content and about our institution.  These questions helped me identify strengths and weaknesses at my institution, and the activity gave me ideas for improving our assessment processes.

Day 2

I enjoyed Day 2 much more.  Day 2 focused on more advanced content, such as rubric development, participant “calibration” training (where you train instructors to use the rubric), and assessment strategies such as surveys, focus groups, artifacts, performance appraisals, etc.

In addition to the more-advanced content, Day 2 also required much more group work to develop assessment plans and assessment rubrics.  Day 2 was much more hands-on, and our group spent a lot of time discussing issues that arose during these activities.  Many of these issues were also issues that assessment leaders face on their campus, so it was useful to address them with other peers.

For example, our group read three sample student essays, and we were required to use a rubric to score components of the essay.  We also had to agree on the score.  As you would predict, our scores on some components differed quite a bit.  This disagreement in scores led to a robust discussion about why some thought the essay deserved 2 points and why others thought it deserved 4 points.

Frequently, the scoring included some reader bias.  One essay included a lot of historical and scientific information; group members in science fields were somewhat familiar with the information, and they thought the straight-forward scientific language of the essay was well done.  In contrast, group members in Humanities fields, who were not familiar with the scientific information and with the scientific writing style, thought the information was unclear and that the writing was un-engaging and lacking in creativity and sophistication.  This range of responses is common when assessment readers come from different academic disciplines, and it was useful to address these challenges at this group setting.

Overall, the HLC workshop provided me with a lot of assessment information, and the reflective journal activities helped me identify strategies for improvement at my institution.  I hope to share more information in this blog about this assessment material and any improvement strategies I implement in my work.