Spotlight on: Summer Assessment Workshops

When most College faculty and administrative staff think about how they would like to spend their time during the summer months, working with Elaine Ackerman and department colleagues around the topic of assessment is not usually at the top of the list. In fact, for the “normal” person, it wouldn’t be on the list at all.  Well, I am happy to report that 164 faculty and administrative staff DID include assessment work on their summer activities to-do list and wonderful work was accomplished.

Faculty from 22 academic departments/programs (Art; Biology; Chemistry; Classical Studies; CSTA; Education; Education (content areas); English (full department); English (Literature); English (Writing); French; German; History; Library; Music; Neuroscience; Nursing; Physical Education and Health; Religion; Social Work; Sociology; Women Studies) worked on a wide-range of assessment initiatives such as developing a new assessment plan, writing a new set of student learning outcomes, exploring new assessment tools and working on the assessment components of their upcoming self-study.

Sixteen faculty members (representing the CORE Committee) formed four teams organized around the CORE areas (Natural Science and Math, Social Sciences, and Arts and Humanities) and conducted a series of assessment activities including:        

• A workshop facilitated by David Sprunger, English, in which faculty members assessed randomly selected samples from various Fall 2011 Inquiry Seminars.
• Eight faculty members participated in workshops for the purpose of conducting a second phase of a pilot assessment of the CORE‘s Exploration courses. 

Summer assessment activities were also prevalent among a number of non-academic departments/programs. Twelve members of the Student Affairs staff (Career Services, Counseling Services, Orientation, Residential Life) worked on identifying goals, establishing measurable student learning outcomes and determining potential assessment tools.

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