Get SMART with Assessment

Assessment Day:         Get ready for Assessment Day on August 7. Mary Allen, an expert on outcomes assessment, will lead a four-hour workshop in Nissan Auditorium, starting at 8:15 AM. After lunch, she will brainstorm with departments about their own assessment issues.

 

The ‘R’ and the ‘T’:    SMART Assessment isn’t smart without the ‘R’ and the ‘T.’ Last fall departments filled out the SMA blocks on their SMART Plans. To complete their SMART Reports this time around, they need to fill out the ‘R’ and ‘T’ blocks. For tips on filling out the SMART forms, see the Assessment website: http://www.muw.edu/vpaa/Assessment%20Tips.html.

 

CLA:                           Change is taking place. This fall the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) will take the place of the CAAP. Like similar national-normed tests, the CLA is designed to supplement homegrown assessments and to assess the effectiveness of MUW’s general-education curriculum against that of other universities. The CLA will test 100 incoming freshmen this fall and 100 graduating seniors this spring on critical thinking, analytic reasoning, and written communication. Students will engage in either two analytic writing tasks (making an argument and critiquing an argument) or one performance task (using provided documents, such as articles and graphs, to generate responses about real-life scenarios). To see what a retired performance task looks like, go to this site: http://cla.cae.org. Then type this session number directly into the field without pasting: 5115-531929. You will be prompted to register. Simply make up identification if you would like. For more samples, go to this link: http://www.cae.org/content/pro_collegiate_sample_measures.htm.

 

VALUE Project:           National tests are still the norm, but the VALUE Project is making headway in shifting the national assessment culture. This project seeks to define, through nationwide faculty input, “the essential learning outcomes” in general education and to assess them, not through national tests, but through authentic student work. For more information about this project, see a series of articles in the recent issue of Peer Review: http://www.aacu.org/peerreview/pr-wi09/pr-wi09_index.cfm. Also check out the resources on the website Opened Practices, created as part of the VALUE project: http://openedpractices.org/.