Assessment Definitions

All vocabulary words below are based on definitions provided in Assessing Student Learning: A Common Sense Guide, 3rd Edition (Suskie, 2018).  For more information, the second edition of Assessing Student Learning and other books on assessment can be found in the CCRI library. 

Assessment Plan

Learning outcomes define what we want students to know or be able to do after completing a course or program. Assessment plans outline how we will evaluate what students know and are helpful because they communicate what will be done, document the process to meet our accreditation requirements, and allow for feedback to ensure than assessment efforts are effective. For faculty selected to take part in the General Education Assessment initiative, the assessment plans that will be submitted will include:

• A description of how the learning outcome will be assessed
• How the student work will be collected or analyzed
• If work from all students in the section are not assessed, how the selected assignments will be chosen
• What the faculty member will be submitting (e.g., examples of student work, the rubric used, and rubric scores by student)
• How you will decide what acceptable outcomes will be
• How the results will be summarized
• How the results will be shared with your department

Assessment Results

A summary of how students performed across the rubric criteria or test questions aligning with the outcome's key indicator will be submitted, allowing us to aggregate student performance across multiple sections. For focus groups, an analysis of the themese and common answers will provide a qualitiative understanding of the assessment results. Examples of inadequate, minimally acceptable, and exemplary student work may also be provided. 

Focus Group

Focus groups are in-person interviews of small groups of people. Focus groups can be used to ask students to reflect on their learning and to collect information about their behaviors and processes. Focus group questions should be planned in advance, open-ended, and connected to how you will use student discussion responses. 

Rubric

A rubric is a written guide for assessing student work. A rubric can be as simple as a checklist or a rating scale, but most typically, an analytic rubric defines levels of performance for a series of traits or criteria associated with the learning outcomes it seeks to measure. Rubrics can be used to score student work, show growth over time, and articulate learning outcomes. Rubrics can allow several dimensions of each of our General Education outcomes to be assessed to determine if work is below, meets, or exceeds the expected performance level for students. 

Test Blueprint

Multiple-choice and other objective tests have a role in assessment. A test blueprint categorizes the test items by the learning outcomes addressed on the test. This process of listing the test questions by the outcome ensures that the test addresses the key indicators that allow us to determine if students have met the outcome being assessed. Scores on each test item provide direct evidence of student learning.