Assessment: Completing Goals with Learning Objectives

Because every unit here is now involved in some way with assessment planning, this is a good time to stress the operational differences between goals, learning outcomes and their relationships to assessment. Assessment of educational programs has a single purpose—namely to improve students’ intellectual development and learning (see Palomba, C. A., and Banta, T. W., 1999, Assessment Essentials: San Francisco, Jossey-Bass, 403 p.) “Student learning” remains the primary concern of departments and is commonly associated with acquisition of content knowledge, attitudes & values, and skills. Professors know their content well, and they understand the knowledge and affective traits that students must cultivate in order to perform well within their discipline and the professions that arise from it.

“Intellectual development” is a separate issue—namely an increasing ability of students to think—to use evidence and to successfully address open-ended problems. This is not well-addressed because there is no emphasis on adult intellectual development in most disciplinary curricula. As a result, few professors and administrators have engaged the key literature that details the recognizable stages of higher level thinking, and the kinds of learning experiences needed to produce growth. (Major resources of “intellectual development” were given in NN v10, n5, and earlier issues summarized the research that established the Perry model— all accessible at the URL at the base of this newsletter).

Goals are essential, and the language of goals describes results in such general terms that they often appear as phrases rather than complete sentences. Our ISU Undergraduate Catalog has twelve goal statements on pages 26 and 27— for example, Goal 5: “To understand how the physical sciences explain the natural world.” Although goals are fundamental, if one has only the language of goals, it is impossible to assess anything. In order to do assessment, one must have an outcome, and in order to achieve an outcome, one must do something. Therefore the language of actions (verbs) pervades outcomes. Our own cited catalog pages reveal the reason that most universities have difficulty with assessment: there are too few action statements.

Let’s take Goal 5: “To understand how the physical sciences explain the natural world,” and develop it through questions that students who “understand” should be able to answer or actions that students should be able to do.

1. What specifically distinguishes science from other endeavors or areas of knowledge such as art, philosophy, or religion?
2. Provide two examples of science and two of technology and use them to explain a central concept by which one can distinguish between science and technology.
3. It is particularly important to not only know ideas, but also where these ideas came from. Pick a single theory from the science represented by this course (biology, chemistry, environmental science, geology, or physics) and explain its historical development.
4. Provide at least two specific examples of methods that employ hypothesis & observation to develop testable knowledge of the physical world.
5. Provide two specific examples that illustrate why it is important to the everyday life of an educated person to be able to understand science.
6. Many factors determine public policy. Use an example to explain how you would analyze one of these determining factors to ascertain if it was truly scientific.
7. Provide two examples that illustrate how quantitative reasoning is used in science.
8. Contrast “scientific theory” with “observed fact.”
9. Provide two examples of testable hypotheses.
10. “Modeling” is a term often used in science. What does it mean to “model a physical system?”
11. What is meant by “natural and physical science?”

Voila! We now have many options through which to assess the meeting of our goal. We can assess our students’ abilities to do these things by knowledge surveys, examinations, portfolios, essays, self-reflection journals, projects, etc.

These objectives came from about three two-hour meetings (not here—YET!) from the professors who taught the goal’s courses. They agreed upon these outcomes as reasons that a student should take a science course. These questions involve science literacy—understanding what science is, and how it works as a means to explain the physical world. The result is that evaluators, teachers, and students can understand what the course is supposed to do. Disciplinary content can be used and learned as the vehicle to get these outcomes, but the purpose of the course as a general educational requirement is now operational and assessable. A new professor or adjunct can easily understand that teaching any course that meets the goal requires expected outcomes as a responsibility, and subsequent faculty can better rely on the assumption that certain things have been done in the course. Such objectives help us to focus and to deliver improved education.

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“What do we mean by expanded forms of scholarship?"
Dr. Devorah Lieberman
Portland State University

Friday, March 28 Business Administration Building (BA)–135 1:30 - 3:30 P.M..
Sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences
and
The Center for Teaching and Learning

Institutions across the country claim that they are open to faculty who pursue different forms of scholarship—including scholarships of teaching, engagement, integration, and discovery. Faculty, however, cite lack of alignment between what are considered as accepted criteria for “scholarship,” and lack of agreement on appropriate ways to document these activities. This session addresses these issues through formal presentation, group work, and discussion. Faculty and administrators are encouraged to attend this session to discuss these issues, in light of the expectations for faculty related to promotion and tenure.

Devorah Lieberman serves as Vice Provost and Special Assistant to the President at Portland State University. She is a faculty member in the Department of Communication Studies at Portland State University, and in 1995 she became the first Director of Teaching and Learning in the Center for Academic Excellence at Portland State University. She received her Ph.D. in Intercultural Communication (1984) from the University of Florida and concurrently received her certification in Gerontology. She has published extensively on topics of institutional change, faculty development, the alignment of technology, and diversity. In 2001, she was named Oregon Professor of the Year by Carnegie/CASE, and in 2000 she received the Portland State University Distinguished Faculty Award.

Please RSVP to nuhfed@isu.edu or call -4703 so we can assure you of both refreshments and a seat!

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REQUEST FOR PROPOSALS University Honors Program
Classes to be offered Spring Semester 2004
Deadline: April 11, 2003

The University Honors Program invites proposals for Idaho State University faculty who wish to teach honors courses during the Spring Semester 2004. The Honors Committee is particularly interested in courses that are part of a thematic sequence of 2-3 courses based on concepts that lend themselves to an interdisciplinary approach.

Proposals are due by 5 p.m. Friday, April 11, 2003, to: Dr. Ed Nuhfer University Honors Program Center for Teaching and Learning Room 434, Fourth Floor Museum Building Campus Box 8010.

Electronic submissions in word processor format may be sent to nuhfed@isu.edu.

For details see http://www.isu.edu/ctl/honors/honrfp.html