Examining Types of Assessment, Planning our Inquiries

1. Examining Types of Assessment, Planning our Inquiries Taft College’s Fall Assessment Team November 7, 2008

2. Objectives for Today • Carefully consider what you want to learn from your individual assessment report • Examine authentic, formative, summative, and embedded assessments • Discuss types of rubrics used to score and measure • Work toward finalizing assessment plans

3. What do you want to assess? • What are you hoping to learn from your assessment project? • How will you measure it? • How do you know the assessment will measure what you hope it will? • How could the results be useful?

4. Authentic Assessment • Janet Fulks defines Authentic Assessment this way: • “Authentic assessment. Assessment that evaluates the student’s ability to use their knowledge and to perform tasks that are approximate those found in the work place or other venues outside of the classroom setting.” • Please refer to page 2 of today’s handout

5. Why? • It is an opportunity for students to perform the outcome, in a real world setting • You have a more accurate picture of students’ abilities • It is mandated by ACCJC (see page 4 of today’s packet)

6. Formative vs. Summative • Summative assessments measure learned knowledge, skills, and attitudes, and happen during the end of a course • Formative assessments let instructors know how to meet the needs of individual students within a course • When do you think it be most useful to use formative assessment? Summative? • How could either help us to improve our students’ learning experience?Please refer to page 5 of today’s handout.

7. Embedded Assessments • Instructors at many campuses have chosen to embed direct assessments into exams. • Selected questions are designed to measure specific learning outcomes. • This process involves careful discussion of what the question will measure and how. • To be accurate, the process requires validation. • Please refer to pages 6 through 11 of today’s handout.

8. Rubrics • Evaluation or scoring instrument • Can be used for grading and assessment • Explain expectations of student work • Can come in a variety of forms

9. Holistic Rubrics • Reduce entire assignment to one score or rank • Primary traits of assignment are grouped together into one score • Are often used to evaluated standardized writing tests • Do not provide the same type of specific, useful data as other rubrics • Can be misleading if one score does not reflect all primary traits of assignment • See Page 3 of Rubric Examples packet

10. Analytic Rubrics • Analytic rubrics allow you to indicate a specific range of achievement for each primary trait or criterion of an assignment. • They can, for a given assignment, provide more specific feedback. • They detail a range of expectations. • They can create more specific, meaningful data in assessment than simply one score. • Without careful explanation, they can seem overwhelming to students. • See page 4 of Rubric Examples.

11. Rubrics and Grades • In the classroom, primary traits of a rubric can be connected to points or percentages of an assignment. • This requires careful planning, since every primary trait in your rubric may have a different value in the assignment. • It may provide students with a tangible motivator to focus on your grading criteria for a given category. • It can also be frustrating if you discover the point or percentage values don’t match the grade you feel the work deserves.

12. Rubrics and Grades • Another approach is to use the rubric without attaching points to it. • Expectations are still clearly defined. • Students can still understand the basis of their grade. • Many instructors find this easier than trying to match point or percentage values appropriately with primary traits.

13. Homegrown or Outside • Homegrown rubrics allow you to include any criteria for any assignment you want. • They allow instructors great flexibility, but are incredibly time consuming to construct well. • It is easy to leave an important criterion out of a rubric by mistake. • It is easy to create a rubric that doesn’t actually match your grading practices. • Sometimes you don’t know until you try; then it is too late.

14. Outside Rubrics • Some rubrics have been rendered reliable and validated through faculty discussion, research, and trial and error. • The reliability of a rubric is determined by how accurately it classifies student work and by how likely it is that two different faculty using the same rubric will get the same results. • This takes a lot of work; much of it has already been done, if we know where to look.

15. Primary Trait Analysis • Think of the criteria you will use to assess an SLO or grade an assignment as your Primary traits. • They can become categories in an analytic rubric. • Creating a performance range for each category allows you to rank performance of the specified tasks. • Go to Janet Fulks’ training manual: • http://online.bakersfieldcollege.edu/courseassessment/Section_4_Assessment_Tools/Section4_6PTA.htm

16. When Writing or Selecting a Rubric • Consider what you want to measure, and how. • Consider the type of data that you want your assessment to produce. An analytic rubric will yield more ranges of data, thereby illuminating key areas of success and weakness in performance. • Consider how you will track the data during your assessment. • Keep the student in mind. • Refer to Allen’s “A Rubric for Rubrics,” page 60 of Rubric Examples.

17. Useful Resources • Janet Fulks’ Training Manual: http://online.bakersfieldcollege.edu/courseassessment/Section_4_Assessment_Tools/Section4_7rubrics.htm • RubiStar (Rubric building web page): http://rubistar.4teachers.org/index.php • Assessment Workshop Materials, Mary Allen:http://www.csub.edu/TLC/options/resources/handouts/AllenWorkshopHandoutJan06.pdf

18. Today • Consider the means of best assessing student learning in your course to give you meaningful data to interpret for improvement. • Solidify your assessment plan. • Communicate the status of your assessment plan with the SLO coordinator.