The Faculty Learning Community on Assessing Student Learning Outcomes in Community Engaged Scholarship gathered for our second meeting on March 9th. Note that as we gather resources, these will be ultimately shared on the Nashman Center website. Anyone interested in student learning outcomes assessment is still most welcome to join this group.
To continue learning more about each other's projects and interests, we shared more about what we want to assess, why, and how. We all concluded that learning more details about what each of us are doing reinforced our belief that this FLC will be a great opportunity for us to learn from each other. Our contexts and goals are different, but there is enough overlap in what we are working to accomplish that we will be able to do a lot of this lifting together and can share the load.
Borrowing from a recent CUMU Huddle on Assessment in CES, we used the “Five Why’s” activity on this prompt: Something I want to evaluate is _____, because if I do, then _____. The Five Why’s activity then has you respond to your original answer by asking Why. Why do you want that? For all the answers that result from that question, you again, ask “Why?”
We also shared some pre-reflection "homework" we had done to prepare for our meeting, facilitated by a chart created by Alex Zoretich, an Americorps VISTA with the Nashman Center (thanks Alex!).
Our reasons for doing this assessment include:
- To learn if our students are learning what we hope they are
- To learn the extent to which community engagement experiences are important for that learning
- To make the case that community engagement experiences are important for student learning, in order to garner more support to continue to do this work.
Our next considerations are around the assessment processes that will be a best fit for each of our contexts, which include assessing outcomes of a single course, outcomes across the curriculum of an academic program, and student learning outcomes from all Nashman Center programs. At present, we are considering development of survey instruments, pre-post test designs, and (as the AACU recommends) using rubrics to assess existing student work from carefully selected assignments.
