Assessment

About Us Academics Administration Alumni & Friends Around Campus Community Education Enrollment

NCC Home Committee Teaching Learning and Technology Roundtable TLTR Proposal Information Proposals Under Consideration TLTR Membership Technology Training Contacts Frequently Asked Questions Tips & Tools External Resources Academic Computing Assessment TLTR Clicker Request Form TLTR Proposal Form 08-09 TLTR Proposal Information 2008-2009 TLTR Smart Request Form To all TLTR project proposers Back

Committee > Teaching Learning and Technology Roundtable > Assessment

Basically, "assessment" asks faculty to answer this question: "how do we know that students know what we thought we taught?" In other words, it is about identifying learning gains achieved over time. Tom Angelo, in an AAHE Bulletin article, defines it this way:

Assessment is an ongoing process aimed at understanding and improving student learning. It involves making our expectations explicit and public; setting appropriate criteria and high standards for learning quality; systematically gathering, analyzing, and interpreting evidence to determine how well performance matches those expectations and standards; and using the resulting information to document, explain, and improve performance. (pp 7-9)

Applied to TLTR proposals, assessment means that faculty should be considering how they will measure the student learning gains, across time, caused by the integration of technology into their course/program. It should have less to do with how the technology will affect their teaching, and more to do with how the technology will help students learn better. And, how we will know that better learning has happened. Again, assessment can be thought of in terms of these four questions:

What should students learn?
How will they learn it?
How will we know that they have learned it?
At what levels of mastery have they learned it?

There are numerous resources on Assessment; here are five:

AAHE website: http://www.aahe.org/initiatives/assessment.htm Angelo, T. A. "Reassessing (and Defining) Assessment." The AAHE Bulletin, 48 (2), November 1995,
Angelo, T. A. Ten Easy Pieces: Assessing Higher Learning in Four Dimensions. In T.A. Angelo (ed.) Classroom Research: Early Lessons from Success. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, no 46, Summer 1991, pp 17-31.
Huba, Mary and Jann Freed. Learner-Centered Assessment on College Campuses. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2000.
Suskie, Linda. "Fair Assessment Practices." The AAHE Bulletin, May 2000. (also available at http://www.aahebulletin.com/ )