Past Assessment Revolutionary Award Recepients
Past Assessment Revolutionary Award Recipients
Qing Ryan, Nina Abramzon, Alex Small, Homeyra Sadaghiani, Shohreh Abdolrahimi, Breanna Binder, and Coral Wheeler in the Physics and Astronomy department drew from its own discipline and used FCI (force concept inventory) to compare learning gains across the nation with other institutions. The program provided optional recitation sections in a bottleneck course which enabled the program to collect diagnostic data and learning gains over several years to measure impact.
Assessment Revolutionary Award Special Mention
Gabriel Davidov Pardo from Nutrition and Food Science used a four-stage closing the loop strategy to develop, refine, and utilize a rubric to better capture nuances in specific areas of improvement for MS-level theses.
Mario Guerrero and Robert Nyenhuis from Political Science found gaps in students’ performance in research methods. In response, Political Science redesigned its research methods curriculum to incorporate practical activities and project-based assignments.
2021
Ron Heimler and more than 200 faculty have participated in the Fearless Classroom project, impacting over 9,000 students from eight colleges as of Spring 2022. The Fearless Classroom is a research-based intentional approach to form psychologically-safe classroom communities. Assessment findings helped determine the extent to which project goals were achieved, including instructor-created learning environments that support success, equity and inclusion rates, and students’ sense of belonging over the course of the academic term. The Fearless Classroom looks to these assessment results for further refinement.
2020
Ruth Guthrie, Zeynep Aytug, and Rita Kumar in the College of Business Administration for enhancing assessment capacity by using cause-related marketing to purchase an “assessment cow” for a needy family through the Heifer Foundation. Participation in various assessment tasks earned faculty cash towards this purpose, and created a concurrent assessment buzz within the college. Key take-aways include the need to engage lecturers more intentionally in assessment, and that assessment needs to move beyond being compliance-driven and more focused on learning improvement.
Juliana Fuqua (Psychology) , Faye Wachs (Sociology), Angela Shih, Paul Nissenson, and Priscilla Zhao (Mechanical Engineering) for their work with ME3111 Fluid Mechanics course assessment. This interdisciplinary team has been conducting assessment and innovation to improve student success in multiple courses within the Department of Mechanical Engineering. The team used quantitative and qualitative data, including the use of focus groups, structured interviews, and surveys to understand the barriers and facilitators of student success in this bottleneck course, and to evaluate the efficacy of various closing-the-loop strategies.
Majed Muhtaseb and the Department of Finance, Real Estate, and Law for their consistent and strategic use of assessment best practices. Based on analysis and discussion of assessment data measured against benchmarks, FRL faculty developed 50+ innovative video lessons as interventions to strengthen student learning and improve students’ problem-solving skills.