2019 Assessment Practice and Discovery Mini Grant Participants
Brady Collins, Department of Political Science
The Master’s in Public Administration (MPA) program is currently at a crossroads. The program suffers from a lack of clearly defined learning objectives through which we can evaluate the curriculum and student performance. In order to ensure that the program serves students and continues to attract qualified applicants, it is crucial that we develop concrete and measurable metrics that can be applied to our capstone project/thesis. The purpose of this project is to develop structured rubrics that can be used by myself, MPA faculty, as well as MiPAAC (the program's external advisory board) to evaluate student work and make informed judgements about how to improve the program. These structured rubrics will be used at the end of each year when we receive final drafts of student projects and theses. By ensuring our students are meeting concrete and scalable learning objectives, our program will be better suited to meet the needs of public and nonprofit organizations in the region and establish a competitive advantage among comparable MPA programs.
Shokoufeh Mirzaei, Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering
The goal of this project is to assess student learning outcomes in IE-327 Systems Engineering that is flipped and uses project-based learning (PBL). A flipped lesson plan is prepared for implementation in Fall 2019. The plan includes five class projects that entail designing a system from conceptual design to integrating and building an actual prototype for testing. This course, offered by the Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering (IME) department, is a core course which impacts 100% of the Industrial Engineering (IE) students. In addition to the IE undergraduate students, students in the Master of Systems Engineering program could benefit from the improvement made in IE-327. Both objective and subjective assessment methods will be used to determine the effectiveness of the filled PBL approach in IE 327 and are consistent with accreditation requirements of ABET. The long-term assessment of the student learning outcome will be made by comparing the IME Senior Exit Survey results for IE 327 from before and after the PBL was introduced to the course.
Elizabeth Foster, Department of Kinesiology & Health Promotion
Assessment can provide valuable information about student success of learning. Implementation of a rubric was utilized for students to self-reflect on the impact of service-learning in adapted physical education on a broader learning outcome. The results from pre and post student self-assessed course outcomes of civic engagement and service learning are presented, along with course aligned assignments. The impact of student's civic awareness of diversity and promoting advocacy for students with disabilities will be discussed.
Mario Guerrero, Department of Political Science
The Political Science department has several instructional goals that center on developing student’s research and professional capabilities using scholarly resources, analyzing data, communicating findings orally and in writing, and drawing on experiences with community partner organizations. In this project, we collected data and assessed the degree to which our instructors’ class assignments introduce, develop, and test students’ mastery of these skillsets. We detail our findings and discuss how our project will result in an iterative process of assessment at the departmental level.
Yao Olive Li, Department of Nutrition & Food Science
Agriculture is made of four sub-plans and currently two common core courses are required across all the four sub-plans, with each sub-plan having its own required and elective courses. While each of the four departments developed its sub-plan program's assessment documents, in fall 2018, the CPP Academic Senate suggested a solution to be implemented (AP-001-189) - "if a program/major has multiple options, students need to get a majority of their units from courses with common learning outcomes, but not necessarily the same courses." To address this requirement and to better facilitate the MS graduate programs, the AG College and departmental graduate program coordinators have started to meet and exchange the assessment practices among the four sub-plans and to brainstorm for solutions to coordinate between the four sub-plans. Upon receiving the summer mini grant, the faculty team has met regularly, to 1) identify common core courses and common learning outcomes, 2) develop assessment instruments/tools for the common core courses, and 3) develop a feasible implementation plan for these assessment tools to be pilot-tested at the program level in AY 2019-2020. With the help of the mini grant, we are confident to prepare and present a set of working documents for program assessment, with over 51% common learning outcomes affiliated to different courses offered by four sub-plans, which allows the compliance of the MS Agriculture program with EO 1071. The project fulfills the goal of improving academic consistency, quality and graduation success for the college's graduate students, thus preparing fully across agriculture's disciplines, students' career potential.
Analena Hope, Department of Ethnic & Women’s Studies
The Ethnic & Women's Studies Department looks to our department wide outcomes to revise and add to our overall assessment within our program. The purpose is to address equity gaps, improve existing tools to assess learning outcomes, and create a plan for continuous improvement. We currently have an End of Year Capstone Assessment and an End of Year Senior Assessment. Our goal is to revise our current assessments and add additional assessments using our SLO's, collected data and new data by adding a pre and post course Self-Assessment Survey, Alumni Survey, and Cluster analysis using GPA and Graduation rates. We seek to know who our students to find department needs and the best way to support our students.
Claire Whang, Department of Apparel Merchandising & Management
Assessing students’ performance at a program level is an important step to learn how well the course learning outcomes align with the program learning outcome (PLO) and improve student learning. The goal of this assessment project was threefold: (1) assess the achievement of Student Learning Outcomes (SLO) and PLO2, (2) provide suggestions for course instructors and (3) recommendations for future assessment plan. Course level assessment reports were collected from six AMM courses to assess PLO2. Data from three AMM courses were used to measure SLO1 and SLO2. A total of 143 artifacts were collected for the analysis. As per the assessment plan, individual course rubrics were used to collect data on SLO1 and SLO2. The data was both individually analyzed and aggregated to assess overall achievement toward PLO2. Results suggest that AMM graduates are demonstrating expertise in apparel and the industry (PLO2) by building strong foundational knowledge of apparel design/textiles and retail (SLO1), and then successfully applying that knowledge in the AMM capstone courses (SLO2). Further, 2018/2019 course SLOs seem to be aligned with program SLOs and PLO2. Because the AMM curriculum was envisioned and redesigned during the semester conversion, this first data collection cycle was important to examine whether the new curriculum design supports the AMM program mission and objectives. In the future, the department should ensure course topics are updated on a regular basis reflecting the changes in the US Apparel industry.
Jessica Perez, Department of Electromechanical Engineering Technology
All engineering freshman must take EGR 1000/L to complete their area E general education courses and to support their degree progress. While we can find a student’s math and ELA level by their entrance courses, little attention is paid to their engineering readiness. This readiness is key to developing a sense of belonging and will impact the persistence of students as they matriculate. The First-Year Experience course is key to developing an emerging professional identity for students as engineers who are connected to their field and community. To assess the effectiveness of our program of study, students should be assessed on their knowledge and growth of the ABET Criteria 3 Student Outcomes. These seven outcomes (or five for technology programs) are used to accredit engineering and technology programs. Some of these outcomes include: apply design to produce solutions that fit a set of given parameters; communicate effectively; recognize ethical and professional responsibilities; and apply knowledge to a wide range of problems. The goal of this project is to develop assessments for students to take pre and post (not the exact same assessments) during the completion of EGR 1000/L in the freshman year. This would measure the growth of the student knowledge over the course of their study and be used to support ABET accreditation. This process could be repeated in the senior design project classes to measure growth during the program. Not only will this process inform the program effectiveness, but it will also allow the first-year experience to have informed instruction and build targeting lessons with the goal of developing students’ engineering readiness.
David Edens, Department of Nutrition & Food Science
The Didactic Program in Dietetics (DPD) at CPP is accredited by the Accrediting Council for Education in Nutrition and Dietetics (ACEND). This project was developed to review current processes and ACEND’s assessment requirements. The project’s goal is to streamline the process while maintaining assessment activities that meet the needs of all stakeholders. This qualitative study utilized document analysis to review the current 2017 ACEND Accreditation Standards, the current assessment program for the DPD program, and the previous ACEND self-study report from the 2012 accreditation. The 2019-2020 ACEND accreditation self-study was also reviewed. Two areas of assessment are needed for accreditation. ACEND Standard 4 requires a review of how well the DPD program is meeting its mission and goals. Standard 6 requires an overall assessment plan of learning outcomes within the curriculum. Additionally, Standard 5 requires the program to create a curriculum map.
Our department’s current interpretation of standard 6 is that every KRDN from standard 5 be assessed in every course each time it is taught, which is over 150 items. This practice has been going on since at least 2012. This is unsustainable and much more than required. The data are collected with little reflection. Second, ACEND does not state that the plan must include each KRDN. The DPD program must design a thoughtful means of assessment. There is an opportunity to streamline the entire process to meet the accreditors needs as well as the department, college, and university. Current practices will remain intact, as this is an accreditation year. The department is in the process of preparing the self-study for ACEND, which will be submitted in December 2019. The accreditation visit is scheduled for March 2020. During the accreditation visit, the department validate a revised assessment process with the accreditors.
Saeideh Fallah Fini, Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering
This project focused on revising and improving the assessment plan for the Master of Science in Systems Engineering (MSSE) program offered by the IME department. The MSSE program started in Winter 2016 as a pilot program and was approved in Spring 2019 to become a permanent program. This project involved 1) reviewing and refining the program learning objectives (PLOs) and student learning objectives (SLOs); 2), reviewing and refining the alignment of the PLOs and SLOs to the Graduate Institutional Learning Outcomes (GILOs) and the Strategic Vision; 3) developing a detailed plan and design activities, assignments, criteria, and rubrics for evaluating how MSSE has addressed the SLOs using the courses SE5130:System Engineering Life Cycle Design and Management and SE6950: System Engineering Project. These two courses are capable to evaluate how our SLOs have been addressed. The developed assessment program will be implemented in Fall 2019 to collect and analyze the data and consequently guide the continuous improvement of the program and to uphold its quality/integrity.
Kristin Prins, Department of English & Modern Languages
Five Years of Stretch Composition: An Initial Analysis was a success. Summer of 2019 included a 14-reader assessment of 100 FYC portfolios from AY 18-19, a reflective discussion and follow-up survey of lecturers/readers about the FYC SLOs, initial collective analysis of the first 5 years of Stretch Composition data, sharing out the initial data analysis from the 18-19 assessment with FYC lecturers and campus, and the development and scheduling of professional development workshops for lecturers and TAs in the FYC program. This work was a major step toward the full 5-year report, which will be submitted during the current AY. It has also demonstrated the value of our ongoing FYC Program Assessment to instructors, evidenced through their increased interest in participating in the kinds of professional development activities that will close the loop (including refining our SLOs, developing a more consistent curriculum across sections of FYC, and implementing pedagogical practices that better support the Program’s goals and our students’ learning). This project has helped to raise the profile of program-level assessment among those teaching in the FYC Program, which is a major success in itself. The FYC Program is heavily invested in the continued improvement of teaching and learning, and Program Assessment remains a key component of that work.
Preeti Wadhwa, Department of Management & Human Resources
We share our experiences of launching a peer mentoring initiative for the incoming freshmen at the College of Business Administration (CBA) at CPP. The objectives of this peer-mentoring program are two-fold. First, it aims to contribute to the sense of belonging, self-efficacy, engagement, retention and success of the incoming business freshmen. Second, it aims to help our mentors (senior students at CBA) develop interpersonal, leadership, mentoring, and coaching skills.
Christina Chavez-Reyes, Department of Liberal Studies
Liberal Studies faculty learned its pre- and post-essay assessments were inadequate to measure the complexity of Liberal Studies students’ learning. As a result, it re-designed the semester assessment plan to use signature assignments in courses to assess particular learning outcomes. As a collective, department faculty in Fall 2018 read about signature assignments and discussed the redesigning of a signature assignment in the capstone course, which modeled the process of aligning signature assignments to SLOs and course objectives. Over summer 2019, five faculty members designed five signature assignments and rubrics to measure all 6 SLOs. Each consulted with the department assessment coordinator in mid-summer to receive feedback on their drafts and rubrics, and to provide feedback via a survey about their independent working process on assessment development. During this academic year, three of the six signature assignments will be reviewed by all faculty then revised and piloted as direct measures of two SLOs.