Effective Departmental Outcomes Assessment

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Effective Departmental Outcomes Assessment

• Jon Comer
• Geography Undergraduate Advisor
• Outcomes Assessment Coordinator

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What do you want to learn?

• What are students learning?
• What skills are they obtaining?
• What is not working in your department?
• What is working in your department?
• How can change be implemented?

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When good assessment goes bad

• Geography plan 1995-2003
• Exit interview 14 open-ended questions
• Follow-up interview conducted one-on-one
• Exit exam 10 m/c questions per course

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How to improve your plan

• Dont reinvent the wheel
• www.okstate.edu/assess
• Beg, borrow, and steal shamelessly
• Shop around your discipline, that is!

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What every plan needs

• Direct and indirect methods
• Direct
• Capstone courses or course embedded work
• Exams local, national, professional,
  certifications
• Portfolios, exhibits, competitions
• Indirect
• Surveys, interviews, etc. student self-reported
• Tracking GPA, course grades, retention

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What every plan needs

• Assessment at course, major, univ. level
• Course grades, instructor evaluations, capstone
• Major core courses/all major courses,
  internships, examinations
• University Undergraduate and Graduate Alumni
  Surveys

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What every plan needs

• Quantitative and qualitative information
• GPA, retention, duration, surveys
• Rubrics where possible for you and instructors
• Some open-ended queries for crucial issues

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What every plan needs

• Team effort at the departmental level
• Individual coordinator or committee?
• Colleague buy-in evaluations, use of data
• Departmental support

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What every plan needs

• Efficiency, transparency, and speed
• Minimize student effort for good participation
• Employ methods that are transparent to students
• Use rubrics or check-boxes for fast tabulation of
  results (annual reports due in June)

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When good assessment gets better

• Geography plan 2003 - O
• Instructor evaluations in required courses
  (rubric)
• GPA analysis core, major, institution,
  cumulative
• Exit survey mostly check-box, some open-end
• Time in major, time to graduation statistics
• Undergraduate alumni survey (every-other year)

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So youre finished, right?

• Documenting and interpreting results
• Sharing results with colleagues
• Using results to implement changes
• Evaluating whether changes worked