Five things I learned at the Assessment Institute

Darla Green, Professor, Interior Design / College Success

  1. Questions to ponder:  How do you teach the successful ability to change?  How do we teach and assess emotional intelligence, empathy, flexible thinking?
  2. ePortfolios are more than just a capstone project.  If we teach students how to create, evaluate and reflect on materials for a learning portfolio from day one, students will have not only a record of their learning, but will also have learned how to implement their portfolio for job seeking.
  3. Purposeful assessment in online courses means including the “why” an assignment is important.  Explaining how this assignment will relate to the real world.  Be concise yet fully explain the why.
  4. We need to tell our learning improvement stories – not our assessment tool stories.
  5. Assessment failure is an option!  Don’t fear the failure, it is a learning opportunity not a failure.

Sheri Barrett, Director, Assessment, Evaluation and Institutional Outcomes

  1. “A pig never fattens because it is weighed.” Translation for that saying – assessing students is not what improves student learning, it is the educational intervention that faculty employ that makes the difference.  So it should really be “Weigh pig, feed pig, weigh pig!”
  2. High impact practices are only high impact if there is implementation fidelity. You can badly implement a good practice and it may not be successful.
  3. I have a lot of highly engaged colleagues working to improve the student learning experience. With over 1,000 in attendance, this year’s Assessment Institute offered a plethora of wonderful ideas, strategies, successes, and journeys around improving student learning across the broad spectrum of institutions.
  4. It is still about faculty. An engaged faculty working together to improve student learning is still the most effective assessment tool educational institutions have to improve outcomes.
  5. Don’t wear Chiefs gear in Indianapolis near the Colts stadium.

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