"The support of the assessment staff, graduate assistants, and everyone involved in assessment work on campus has been invaluable in our efforts to employ assessment of student learning for the purpose of program improvement. I frankly could not make heads nor tails out of this assessment work when it was first presented to me in a faculty seminar several years ago. But with expert advice and mentoring by Bill Becker, Cheryl Ramette, and Andy Wang, and with feedback and support from a variety of graduate assistants and ARN members, the ESL/Bilingual Education faculty has created an assessment system that is transparent to our faculty and students, manageable for our program staff, and, most importantly, meaningful in terms of gathering data that we can effectively use to improve our program of study. We have seen both improvement in student competency and increased engagement of the program faculty toward ensuring that students gain competencies in clear and measurable ways.
In this most recent (our second) round of assessment work, Andy Wang constructed an Excel-based tool for analyzing our quantitative data that was remarkably efficient and effective for our staff and faculty to work with. Plus, we were finally able to gather faculty in dialog on assessment, with both aggregated statistics from students' practicum (work samples) and several sample student work samples on the table. The exchange was electrifying. The program faculty and staff left with renewed energy and enthusiasm for our work in preparing ESL/Bilingual educators.
Assessment of student learning for program improvement is really transformational. We went into this process convinced that we were doing good work in preparing ESL/Bilingual educators and after two full rounds of assessment work we are even more committed and enthusiastic about our work as educators—because now we are learning what we do well and how we can learn to do it even better."
Chris Cartwright, MPA Program Specialist
Continuing Education, Graduate School of Education, Portland State University
Methods and Use of Data
The following link (PDF file) will take you to a table summarizing student learning assessment practices and ways in which data is being used in discussions and decision making within departments and programs.
The information in this table has been provided by the departments and programs listed in the table. It is based on assessment information included on the Portland State Program Review database: (http://www.programreview.pdx.edu/assessment).
For a discussion of the data and information in the table, click here.
