Scaffolding Assessment from Lesson Objectives through Student Outcomes: Faculty Perspectives of a Viable Continuous Improvement Model

摘要

Assessment of individual course outcomes and student outcomes can be conducted each semester without extreme burden to any one faculty member if a culture of assessment is established within the faculty and a standard framework of course assessment is implemented. Assessment of each course offering allows individual instructors to evaluate student performance and selected course outcomes and to strengthen or change assessment tools based on student attainment of each outcome. Discussion of student outcomes at the faculty retreats allows faculty to appreciate different assessment measures across the curriculum, to discuss changes to course outcomes or assessment measures that need improvement, and to recognize learning threads that can be integrated into multiple courses throughout the curriculum. Continuous assessment across the curriculum not only keeps assessment manageable for periods approaching accreditation, but also allows for snap shots of student achievements on a longitudinal basis to address any areas that are not meeting minimal standards for accomplishment. The U.A. Whitaker College of Engineering established assessment practices at the inception of the program and maintains the assessment established prior to the first accreditation cycle. This is made viable through a careful orchestration of specific student outcomes in select courses, the recognition that no single course (or faculty member) should assess too many student outcomes, and a conscious link of course outcomes to student outcomes allowing mechanisms to fulfill assessment criteria on multiple levels. Although the engineering programs at FGCU were able to create this assessment process from a blank slate, it is a process that can easily be adopted in existing engineering programs. The key is to be able to extract necessary information from what faculty members should already be doing within their courses, continuously assessing and improving. If faculty members have created course outcomes for each of their courses and then assessed the student achievement of these outcomes, it is then a simple task to map these course outcomes to the program's student outcomes and use the results from multiple courses within the program to assess the student outcomes across the entire program.