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Theron DesRosier

Virtual-TA - 2 views

www.virtual-ta.com/how-we-do-it.php

virtual ta outsource assessment

shared by Theron DesRosier on 07 Apr 10 - Cached
  • We also developed a technology platform that allows our TAs to electronically insert detailed, actionable feedback directly into student assignments
  • Your instructors give us the schedule of assignments, when student assignments are due, when we might expect to receive them electronically, when the scored assignments will be returned, the learning outcomes on which to score the assignments, the rubrics to be used and the weights to be applied to different learning outcomes. We can use your rubrics to score assignments or design rubrics for sign-off by your faculty members.
  • review and embed feedback using color-coded pushpins (each color corresponds to a specific learning outcome) directly onto the electronic assignments. Color-coded pushpins provide a powerful visual diagnostic.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • We do not have any contact with your students. Instructors retain full control of the process, from designing the assignments in the first place, to specifying learning outcomes and attaching weights to each outcome. Instructors also review the work of our TAs through a step called the Interim Check, which happens after 10% of the assignments have been completed. Faculty provide feedback, offer any further instructions and eventually sign-off on the work done, before our TAs continue with the remainder of the assignments
  • Finally, upon the request of the instructor, the weights he/she specified to the learning outcomes will be rubric-based scores which are used to generate a composite score for each student assignment
  • As an added bonus, our Virtual-TAs provide a detailed, summative report for the instructor on the overall class performance on the given assignment, which includes a look at how the class fared on each outcome, where the students did well, where they stumbled and what concepts, if any, need reinforcing in class the following week.
  • We can also, upon request, generate reports by Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs). This report can be used by the instructor to immediately address gaps in learning at the individual or classroom level.
  • Think of this as a micro-closing-of-the-loop that happens each week.  Contrast this with the broader, closing-the-loop that accompanies program-level assessment of learning, which might happen at the end of a whole academic year or later!
  • Theron DesRosier on 07 Apr 10
     
    I went to Virtual TA and Highlighted their language describing how it works.
Nils Peterson

AAC&U News | April 2010 | Feature - 1 views

www.aacu.org/...feature.cfm

shared by Nils Peterson on 01 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Comparing Rubric Assessments to Standardized Tests
  • First, the university, a public institution of about 40,000 students in Ohio, needed to comply with the Voluntary System of Accountability (VSA), which requires that state institutions provide data about graduation rates, tuition, student characteristics, and student learning outcomes, among other measures, in the consistent format developed by its two sponsoring organizations, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), and the Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU).
  • And finally, UC was accepted in 2008 as a member of the fifth cohort of the Inter/National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research, a collaborative body with the goal of advancing knowledge about the effect of electronic portfolio use on student learning outcomes.  
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • outcomes required of all UC students—including critical thinking, knowledge integration, social responsibility, and effective communication
  • “The wonderful thing about this approach is that full-time faculty across the university  are gathering data about how their  students are doing, and since they’ll be teaching their courses in the future, they’re really invested in rubric assessment—they really care,” Escoe says. In one case, the capstone survey data revealed that students weren’t doing as well as expected in writing, and faculty from that program adjusted their pedagogy to include more writing assignments and writing assessments throughout the program, not just at the capstone level. As the university prepares to switch from a quarter system to semester system in two years, faculty members are using the capstone survey data to assist their course redesigns, Escoe says.
  • the university planned a “dual pilot” study examining the applicability of electronic portfolio assessment of writing and critical thinking alongside the Collegiate Learning Assessment,
  • The rubrics the UC team used were slightly modified versions of those developed by AAC&U’s Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education (VALUE) project. 
  • In the critical thinking rubric assessment, for example, faculty evaluated student proposals for experiential honors projects that they could potentially complete in upcoming years.  The faculty assessors were trained and their rubric assessments “normed” to ensure that interrater reliability was suitably high.
  • “We found no statistically significant correlation between the CLA scores and the portfolio scores,”
  • There were many factors that may have contributed to the lack of correlation, she says, including the fact that the CLA is timed, while the rubric assignments are not; and that the rubric scores were diagnostic and included specific feedback, while the CLA awarded points “in a black box”:
  • faculty members may have had exceptionally high expectations of their honors students and assessed the e-portfolios with those high expectations in mind—leading to results that would not correlate to a computer-scored test. 
  • “The CLA provides scores at the institutional level. It doesn’t give me a picture of how I can affect those specific students’ learning. So that’s where rubric assessment comes in—you can use it to look at data that’s compiled over time.”
  • Their portfolios are now more like real learning portfolios, not just a few artifacts, and we want to look at them as they go into their third and fourth years to see what they can tell us about students’ whole program of study.”  Hall and Robles are also looking into the possibility of forming relationships with other schools from NCEPR to exchange student e-portfolios and do a larger study on the value of rubric assessment of student learning.
  • “We’re really trying to stress that assessment is pedagogy,”
  • “It’s not some nitpicky, onerous administrative add-on. It’s what we do as we teach our courses, and it really helps close that assessment loop.”
  • In the end, Escoe says, the two assessments are both useful, but for different things. The CLA can provide broad institutional data that satisfies VSA requirements, while rubric-based assessment provides better information to facilitate continuous program improvement.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 01 Apr 10
       
      CLA did not provide information for continuous program improvement -- we've heard this argument before
  • Gary Brown on 01 Apr 10
     
    The lack of correlation might be rephrased--there appears to be no corrlation between what is useful for faculty who teach and what is useful for the VSA. A corollary question: Of what use is the VSA?
Gary Brown

News: Turning Surveys Into Reforms - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/...nsse

assessment NSSE Closing the loop

shared by Gary Brown on 26 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Molly Corbett Broad, president of the American Council on Education, warned those gathered here that they would be foolish to think that accountability demands were a thing of the past.
  • She said that while she is “impressed” with the work of NSSE, she thinks higher education is “not moving fast enough” right now to have in place accountability systems that truly answer the questions being asked of higher education. The best bet for higher education, she said, is to more fully embrace various voluntary systems, and show that they are used to promote improvements.
  • One reason NSSE data are not used more, some here said, was the decentralized nature of American higher education. David Paris, executive director of the New Leadership Alliance for Student Learning and Accountability, said that “every faculty member is king or queen in his or her classroom.” As such, he said, “they can take the lessons of NSSE” about the kinds of activities that engage students, but they don’t have to. “There is no authority or dominant professional culture that could impel any faculty member to apply” what NSSE teaches about engaged learning, he said.
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  • She stressed that NSSE averages may no longer reflect any single reality of one type of faculty member. She challenged Paris’s description of powerful faculty members by noting that many adjuncts have relatively little control over their pedagogy, and must follow syllabuses and rules set by others. So the power to execute NSSE ideas, she said, may not rest with those doing most of the teaching.
  • Research presented here, however, by the Wabash College National Study of Liberal Arts Education offered concrete evidence of direct correlations between NSSE attributes and specific skills, such as critical thinking skills. The Wabash study, which involves 49 colleges of all types, features cohorts of students being analyzed on various NSSE benchmarks (for academic challenge, for instance, or supportive campus environment or faculty-student interaction) and various measures of learning, such as tests to show critical thinking skills or cognitive skills or the development of leadership skills.
  • The irony of the Wabash work with NSSE data and other data, Blaich said, was that it demonstrates the failure of colleges to act on information they get -- unless someone (in this case Wabash) drives home the ideas.“In every case, after collecting loads of information, we have yet to find a single thing that institutions didn’t already know. Everyone at the institution didn’t know -- it may have been filed away,” he said, but someone had the data. “It just wasn’t followed. There wasn’t sufficient organizational energy to use that data to improve student learning.”
  • “I want to try to make the point that there is a distinction between participating in NSSE and using NSSE," he said. "In the end, what good is it if all you get is a report?"
  • Kimberly Green on 26 Oct 09
     
    An interesting discussion, exploring basic questions CTLT folks are familiar with, grappling with the question of how to use survey data and how to identify and address limitations. 10 years after launch of National Survey of Student Engagement, many worry that colleges have been speedier to embrace giving the questionnaire than using its results. And some experts want changes in what the survey measures. I note these limitations, near the end of the article: Adrianna Kezar, associate professor of higher education at the University of Southern California, noted that NSSE's questions were drafted based on the model of students attending a single residential college. Indeed many of the questions concern out-of-class experiences (both academic and otherwise) that suggest someone is living in a college community. Kezar noted that this is no longer a valid assumption for many undergraduates. Nor is the assumption that they have time to interact with peers and professors out of class when many are holding down jobs. Nor is the assumption -- when students are "swirling" from college to college, or taking courses at multiple colleges at the same time -- that any single institution is responsible for their engagement. Further, Kezar noted that there is an implicit assumption in NSSE of faculty being part of a stable college community. Questions about seeing faculty members outside of class, she said, don't necessarily work when adjunct faculty members may lack offices or the ability to interact with students from one semester to the next. Kezar said that she thinks full-time adjunct faculty members may actually encourage more engagement than tenured professors because the adjuncts are focused on teaching and generally not on research. And she emphasized that concerns about the impact of part-time adjuncts on student engagement arise not out of criticism of those individuals, but of the system that assigns them teaching duties without much support. S
  • Gary Brown on 02 Nov 09
     
    Repeat of highlighted resource, but merits revisiting.
Gary Brown

Ethics? Let's Outsource Them! - Brainstorm - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 4 views

chronicle.com/...22408

rubrics. outsource

shared by Gary Brown on 09 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Many students are already buying their papers from term-paper factories located in India and other third world countries. Now we are sending those papers back there to be graded. I wonder how many people are both writing and grading student work, and whether, serendipitously, any of those people ever get the chance to grade their own writing.”
  • The great learning loop of outcomes assessment is neatly “closed,” with education now a perfect, completed circle of meaningless words.
  • With outsourced grading, it’s clearer than ever that the world of rubrics behaves like that wicked southern plant called kudzu, smothering everything it touches. Certainly teaching and learning are being covered over by rubrics, which are evolving into a sort of quasi-religious educational theory controlled by priests whose heads are so stuck in playing with statistics that they forget to try to look openly at what makes students turn into real, viable, educated adults and what makes great, or even good, teachers.
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  • Writing an essay is an art, not a science. As such, people, not instruments, must take its measure, and judge it. Students have the right to know who is doing the measuring. Instead of going for outsourced grading, Ms. Whisenant should cause a ruckus over the size of her course with the administration at Houston. After all, if she can’t take an ethical stand, how can she dare to teach ethics?
  • "People need to get past thinking that grading must be done by the people who are teaching.” Sorry, Mr. Rajam, but what you should be saying is this: Teachers, including those who teach large classes and require teaching assistants and readers, need to get past thinking that they can get around grading.
  • Gary Brown on 09 Apr 10
     
    the outsourcing loop becomes a diatribe against rubrics...
  • Joshua Yeidel on 16 Apr 10
     
    It's hard to see how either outsourced assessment or harvested assessment can be accomplished convincingly without rubrics. How else can the standards of the teacher be enacted by the grader? From there we are driven to consider how, in the absence of a rubric, the standards of the teacher can be enacted by the student. Is it "ethical" to use the Potter Stewart standard: "I'll know it when I see it"?
  • Gary Brown on 16 Apr 10
     
    Yes, who is the "priest" in the preceding rendering--one who shares principles of quality (rubrics), or one who divines a grade a proclaims who is a "real, viable, educated adult"?
Gary Brown

At Colleges, Assessment Satisfies Only Accreditors - Letters to the Editor - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 2 views

chronicle.com/...49236

accreditation assessment faculty development

shared by Gary Brown on 24 Nov 09 - Cached
  • Some of that is due to the influence of the traditional academic freedom that faculty members have enjoyed. Some of it is ego. And some of it is lack of understanding of how it can work. There is also a huge disconnect between satisfying outside parties, like accreditors and the government, and using assessment as a quality-improvement system.
  • We are driven by regional accreditation and program-level accreditation, not by quality improvement. At our institution, we talk about assessment a lot, and do just enough to satisfy the requirements of our outside reviewers.
  • Standardized direct measures, like the Major Field Test for M.B.A. graduates?
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  • The problem with the test is that it does not directly align with our program's learning outcomes and it does not yield useful information for closing the loop. So why do we use it? Because it is accepted by accreditors as a direct measure and it is less expensive and time-consuming than more useful tools.
  • Without exception, the most useful information for improving the program and student learning comes from the anecdotal and indirect information.
  • We don't have the time and the resources to do what we really want to do to continuously improve the quality of our programs and instruction. We don't have a culture of continuous improvement. We don't make changes on a regular basis, because we are trapped by the catalog publishing cycle, accreditation visits, and the entrenched misunderstanding of the purposes of assessment.
  • The institutions that use it are ones that have adequate resources to do so. The time necessary for training, whole-system involvement, and developing the programs for improvement is daunting. And it is only being used by one regional accrediting body, as far as I know.
  • Until higher education as a whole is willing to look at changing its approach to assessment, I don't think it will happen
  • Gary Brown on 24 Nov 09
     
    The challenge and another piece of evidence that the nuances of assessment as it related to teaching and learning remain elusive.
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