Originally posted on July 9, 2016, on LindaSuskie.com
I often describe the teaching-learning-assessment process as a four-step cycle:
1. Clear learning outcomes
2. A curriculum and pedagogies designed to provide students with enough learning opportunities to achieve those outcomes
3. Assessment of those outcomes
4. Use of assessment results to improve the other parts of the cycle: learning outcomes, curriculum, pedagogies, and assessment
I also often point out that, if faculty are struggling to figure out how to assess something, the problem is often not assessment per se but the first two steps. After all, if you have clear outcomes and you’re giving students ample opportunity to achieve them, you should be grading students on their achievement of those outcomes, and there’s your assessment evidence. So the root cause of assessment struggles is often poorly articulated learning outcomes, a poorly designed curriculum, or both.
I see this a lot in the transfer AA/AS degrees offered by community colleges. As I explained in my June 20 blog entry, these degrees, designed for transfer into a four-year college major, typically consist of 42-48 credits of general education courses plus 12-18 credits related to the major. The general education and major-related components are often what I call “Chinese menu” curricula: Choose one course from Column A, two from Column B, and so on. (Ironically, few Chinese have this kind of menu any more, but people my age remember them.)
The problem with assessing these programs is the second step of the cycle, as I explained in my June 20 blog. in many cases these aren’t really programs; they’re simply collections of courses without coherence or progressive rigor. That makes it almost impossible both to define meaningful program learning outcomes (the first step of the cycle) or assess them (the third step of the cycle).
How can you deal with this mess? Here are my suggestions.
1. Clearly define what a meaningful “program” is. As I explained in my June 20 blog entry, many community colleges are bound by state or system definitions of a “program” that aren’t meaningful. Regardless of the definition to which you may be bound, I think it makes the most sense to think of the entire AA/AS degree as the program, with the 12-18 credits beyond gen ed requirements as a concentration, specialization, track or emphasis of the program.
2. Identify learning outcomes for both the degree and the concentration, recognizing that there should often be a relation between the two. In gen ed courses, students develop important competencies such as writing, analysis, and information literacy. In their concentration, they may achieve some of those competencies at a deeper or broader level, or they may achieve additional outcomes. For example, students in social science concentrations may develop stronger information literacy and analysis skills than students in other concentrations, while students in visual arts concentrations may develop visual communication skills in addition to the competencies they learn in gen ed.
Some community colleges offer AA/AS degrees in which students complete gen ed requirements plus 12-18 credits of electives. In these cases, students should work with an advisor to identify their own,unique program/concentration learning outcomes and select courses that will help them achieve those outcomes.
3. Use the following definition of a program (or concentration) learning outcome: Every student in the program (or concentration) takes at least two courses with learning activities that help him or her achieve the program learning outcome. This calls for fairly broad rather than course-specific learning outcomes.
If you’re struggling to find outcomes that cross courses, start by looking at course syllabi for any common themes in course learning outcomes. Also think about why four-year colleges want students to take these courses. What are student learning, beyond content, that will help them succeed in upper division courses in the major? In a pre-engineering program, for example, I’d like to think that the various science and math courses students take help them graduate with stronger scientific reasoning and quantitative skills than students in non-STEM concentrations.
4. Limit the number of learning outcomes; quality is more important than quantity here. Concentrations of 12-18 credits might have just one or two.
5. Also consider limiting your course options by consolidating Chinese-menu options into more focused pathways, which we are learning improve student success and completion. I’m intrigued by what Alexandra Waugh calls “meta-majors”: focused pathways that prepare students for a cluster of four-year college majors, such as health sciences, engineering, or the humanities, rather than just one.
6. Review your curricula to make sure that every student, regardless of the courses he or she elects, will graduate with a sufficiently rigorous achievement of every program (and concentration) learning outcome. An important principle here: There should be at least one course in which students can demonstrate achievement of the program learning outcome at the level of rigor expected of an associate degree holder prepared to begin junior-level work. In many cases, an entry-level course cannot be sufficiently rigorous; your program or concentration needs at least one course that cannot be taken the first semester. If you worry that prerequisites may be a barrier to completion, consider Passaic County Community College’s approach, described in my June 20 blog.
7. Finally, you’ve got meaningful program learning outcomes and a curriculum designed to help students achieve them at an appropriate level of rigor, so you're ready to assess those outcomes. The course(s) you’ve identified in the last step are where you can assess student achievement of the outcomes. But one additional challenge faces community colleges: many students transfer before taking this “capstone” course. So also identify a program/concentration “cornerstone” course: a key course that students often take before they transfer that helps students begin to achieve one or more key program/concentration learning outcomes. Here you can assess whether students are on track to achieve the program/concentration learning outcome, though at this point they probably won’t be where you want them by the end of the sophomore year.