| Aligning assessment at the institutional level |
"Developing an assessment procedure to enhance student learning outcomes in critical thinking/information management"
Sean McKitrick, Binghampton University, New York, USA
"United States Naval Academy Case Study: Using the Adoption of Innovation Literature to Guide Institutional Strategies for Assessment"
Dr. Peter Gray, United States Naval Academy, USA
Expert facilitator: Dr. Steve Ehrmann, The TLT Group, USA - 
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Please download case study texts by the author by clicking the links below.
Overview: This case study describes the initial organization of an assessment process that evaluates student performance with regard to critical thinking and information management, a general education student learning outcome at Binghamton University (State University of New York) which is assumed to be integrated throughout the university’s general education curriculum. This case study adopts an organizational perspective toward assessment, positing that without including key faculty groups in initial attempts to assess learning outcomes, and without a central system for implementing assessment efforts, impacting curriculum, teaching, and learning in critical thinking/information management is a most difficult task. The case study applies to universities, university divisions, departments, and programs that desire to learn about organizational strategies of assessment that, in the end, could impact teaching, curriculum, and pedagogical initiatives that affect student learning. This case study fits under the theme “great designs for assessment” and “institutional strategies (designs) for assessment.”
Overview: One of the biggest challenges is for a campus community to go from viewing assessment as an innovation engaged in by a relatively small number of early adopters to its institutionalization as part of the campus culture. This case study describes the path that the United States Naval Academy is taking to make such a transition. The literature on the adoption of innovation provides the guiding principles for this effort (see Gray 1997). As Hall, Loucks, Rutherford, and Newlove (1975, p. 53) have pointed out, “Innovation adoption is a process not a decision-point–a process that each innovation user experiences individually.” The purpose of using the guiding principles of innovation adoption is to ensure that assessment at the Naval Academy is meaningful, manageable, and sustainable (The Program Assessment Consultation Team 1999) and, ultimately, to achieve horizontal and vertical integration of assessment efforts as described in the Middle States Commission on Higher Education Characteristics of Excellence (2006).
Session details A chat session was held here with the Authors and Expert facilitator on the 29th May from 16:00 - 17:00 UK time (BST). You may view a transcript of this chat from the link below.
Chat transcript - Aligning assessment at the institutional level
The discussion forum will be open throughout the conference, and can be accessed through the 'Join the discussion' link below.
Join the DiscussionUse the 'Join the Discussion' link to view all the posts for this session. As a taster, below are the last 5 posts for this session's discussion fora.
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Several people have raised questions about the difficulty of working from summative data of what students have learned; it often provides little guidance about how to improve their learning in the future. It's worth looking for exceptions to that...
Hi Stephen...I agree with your comment that the assessment of outcomes doesn't necessarily give much guidance for how learning might be improved, especially given that students often seem to be resistant to engaging in learning activities unless they...
You say, Stephen, that: "...workload is a slippery concept. I've only seen one study of how much time instructors spend teaching a course, and it was a small pilot. But findings hinted that the time/course was more a matter of individual style or pre...