Author: emgonline

Taking Assessment Personally Or, How I Was Reminded of the Value of General Education
by David Smith, director, Office of Assessment, New Mexico State University

Since this post was originally published on the Interstate Passport blog in 2016, the state of New Mexico completed a general education (GE) reform process with the goal of prioritizing and improving the learning of five essential skills: communication, critical thinking, information literacy, quantitative reasoning, and personal and social responsibility. Teaching essential skills will be integrated into a curriculum organized around traditional knowledge areas such as science, the humanities, etc. The resulting model aligns remarkably well with the Interstate Passport’s nine knowledge and skill areas, and also with the Baccalaureate Experience learning outcomes. Implementation of this GE model over the next two years has instilled a new urgency into the need to make learning and assessment of essential skills both meaningful and effective.

At my institution, we have a set of institutional student learning objectives called the Baccalaureate Experience. These bachelor’s-level general education objectives include things like creativity, self-awareness, critical thinking, and life-long learning. It’s a great list, but I wonder, does it serve its purpose well? Are faculty and students aware of it? Does it in any way guide what they do? One of my greatest challenges is to make the Baccalaureate Experience meaningful. How? Let me begin by telling a story.

I started in my new position as director of assessment in July of 2015, excited by a new challenge and confident the timing was right for change. I’d been on the faculty for 21 years, and I loved teaching chemistry and working day-to-day with students, especially the ones just stepping out. They were wide-eyed with curiosity, about life if not chemistry, and I felt honored to meet them in that liminal space as they transitioned into independence. I had attended and led events at our Teaching Academy over the past several years and was chair of one of my institution’s assessment committees. So, when an opening appeared for our assessment director position, I decided to apply. I wouldn’t have had the confidence to do that even a few years prior, but a mid-life period of self-discovery and re-evaluation left me thirsty for change and a new challenge.

However, confidence is a fickle friend. By January in my new position, I’d discovered lots of things about assessment that I “didn’t know I didn’t know.” Every duty seemed to take an order of magnitude more time than it should, and I was falling behind. Confidence transformed to doubt, often in the middle of the night, and it seemed I had an appointment with anxiety every Monday morning. Did I really have what it takes to do this job? Was I foolish to try this now, when my whole life felt upside-down? In the middle of this struggle, my friend Elaine suggested I do an exercise.

Set aside self-criticism for the moment and answer this question. What are the things about you that help you do your job well? Focus on who you are, not on what you do.

So, I made a list, and it looked something like this:

• Communication skills: clear writing; engaging presentations; one-on-one conversations
• Interpersonal skills: empathy and compassion; listening to understand and asking questions; ability to take different perspectives and value various motives; giving others freedom for growth
• Knowledge: teaching and learning principles; assessment principles; the faculty experience of assessment; relationships between assessment, accreditation, and program review
• Metacognitive skills: self-awareness and self-reflection
• Analysis / critical thinking skills: identifying what is most important; discerning and critiquing relationships within complex circumstances and ideas; creating metaphorical connections
• Organizational skills Leadership skills: facilitating group discussions; recognizing individuals’ strengths and weaknesses
• Quantitative skills: spending time with data!

Now, about three-fourths of the way through making this list, something connected in my brain, and I had a sudden, exciting thought:

This is what we want our students to learn! Life skills like these!

And then, after pausing for a moment:

Well, duh, of course it is! You’ve been telling people this for months! This is the Baccalaureate Experience.

Imagine entering a favorite restaurant from the back, through the kitchen. You don’t know where you are, but it seems familiar, the sounds and smells. Then, when you walk out from the kitchen, it all clicks into place. “Oh… that’s where I am!” Seeing it from the other side gives you a new perspective, a new appreciation, one that you’ll never lose. This was one of those moments for me. I stumbled across the idea that student learning, and learning assessment, should be about more than disciplinary learning. It should be about building life skills. The idea wasn’t new; it’s at the heart of general education. But the context was new, and that made it real. It made it personal.

About David: As director of assessment, David Smith provides assessment resources, support and feedback for faculty and staff throughout the NMSU system as they strive to improve the learning and overall experience of students. He received his Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1989 and began his career as a faculty member of NMSU’s Chemistry and Biochemistry Department in 1994. During his 21 years of teaching, Smith has been a leading proponent of course assessment on the NMSU campus and a mentor to numerous graduate student and faculty instructors.

Campus representatives, who play a vital role in serving active military and veteran students at member and prospective member institutions in the Interstate Passport Network, convened July 17-18 at WICHE in Boulder, CO, to discover how earning a Passport could help students from these mobile populations.

The purpose of this workshop was for attendees to learn about the current status of Interstate Passport and how the program can assist active military and veteran students through the transfer process. By training these 31 advisors to train other advisors on their campuses, staff hope to ensure that students across the Network are hearing a consistent message regarding the benefits that Interstate Passport provides. Other topics on the workshop program included the perspectives of Education Service Officers on some of the best practices for educating airmen; successful strategies and lessons learned in advising veterans, family members and active duty students; and unique programs and online offerings for military and veteran students available from participating institutions.

Noted presenters from the Air Force included Dr. R Joel Farrell, chief of academic analytics for Air University; Cheryl Holt, Ellsworth Air Force Base education services specialist; and Dr. William Kono, Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam’s senior civilian advisor.

Tony Flores, program coordinator of Utah State University’s Veterans Resource Office, stated that “the workshop gave us the opportunity to focus on this highly mobile population that is often negatively affected by transfer and how earning a Passport provides an opportunity to minimize these effects. Membership in the Interstate Passport Network can assist veterans, service members, and their dependents at our institutions. The more that we can highlight this opportunity for our students and encourage expansion of the Network will be the key.”

by Micheal Torrens, Director of Institutional Research and Accreditation, Utah State University

As the director of institutional research and accreditation at Utah State University (USU), I’ve had a lot of time to work on, and think about, student success. Among a host of measures and indicators, I believe that there is wide agreement that graduation rates are a gold standard of success. Of course, there are a variety of ways to interpret student success based on degree attainment (e.g. “intended degree” vs. “achieved degree;” time-to-graduation/efficiency discussions, etc.), but there is not much dispute that this is a broad area where there should be almost perfect overlap between students’ and institutions’ goals and measurement of success.

Unfortunately, the current federal definition of “graduation rate” has created a set of perverse incentives. The most widely used measures of success, graduation rates at 100 percent and 150 percent of time, only count graduations for students that start and complete at the same institution. These are the rates that are used for almost all major ranking systems (e.g. U.S. News & World Report), they are used for state-level management and performance funding, and they are the most widely published federal statistics (e.g. IPEDS, College Navigator, etc.). Given that – according to National Student Clearinghouse data – 37 percent of today’s students transfer at least once, it strikes me that this is wrong and in desperate need of re-thinking and correction.

What does this set of incentives mean for public institutions in most states? I can tell you my experience from conferences, meeting rooms, and hall-way conversations: Discussions of how to “shape the class” to maximize 150 percent graduation rates. How to keep high-risk students or potential transfer students “out of the cohort.” Concerns about “incentives” that might encourage transfer of first-time, full-time students to other institutions. This has been of particular interest to me as I’ve had a chance to talk with institutions that have joined, or are considering joining, the Interstate Passport Network.

Two-year institutions are almost universally enthusiastic. They understand that some, perhaps many, of their students will transfer out short of completing their Associates degree, and they intuitively understand the benefits that Interstate Passport’s block transfer of general education learning outcomes provides for those students. Four-year institutions, on the other hand, are frequently less enthusiastic. Given the current state of assessment discussions at most four-year institutions, many are quick to understand and support the idea of measuring and transferring learning outcomes (vs. relying upon course titles, descriptions, syllabi, etc.), but then comes the inevitable question: Can we just accept Passports without having to issue them; won’t this encourage students to transfer away from our institution? I would like to convince you that this is wrong, and short-sighted in a couple of ways.

First, the discussion of student success is advancing rapidly at the state and federal levels, and it is easy for me to envision that we will be looking “beyond our college gate” within the next ten years. Non-profit and higher-ed supported initiatives, like Student Achievement Measure, are already looking beyond transfer to measure and credit subsequent enrollment and graduation at institutions other than the starting one. Recent articles in the New York Times, Forbes, and other publications suggest that there is a growing focus on the need for a better definition. The data on student graduation across institutions is already available from the National Student Clearinghouse, and it is getting more assertive about publishing those results nationally.

Second, my experience at USU suggests that that concern about the Interstate Passport encouraging transfer away from four-year institutions is overblown. Each institution is unique, but at USU – Utah’s land-grant public research institution – we have a fairly high proportion of undergraduates who get married before graduation. For students married at different ages, it’s not unusual for one spouse to need to leave campus to start work in a different area of the state, or a different state, while the other spouse continues to work on his or her degree. The transferability of credits from our institution to another, in those cases, has practically no impact upon the decision to move. A shortsighted view that only counts a student’s success while they are within our four walls is the exact opposite of what’s needed, and this is where I see the Interstate Passport program as a tremendous support for all of our students’ success.

For students that must transfer (because of job, family, or circumstances), for students that want to transfer (because of opportunity, fit, or changes in life plans), for members of the armed forces studying at our institutions (and subject to deployment or transfer), the transfer loss of credits, time, and money can be devastating. In some cases, it ends the dream of achieving a degree entirely. The Interstate Passport program is one tool to combat those losses, and to support our students’ success, no matter where they land. That is why I support it.