Group #2 Roundtable: Assessment and Discounted Dreams

What did the film Discounted Dreams say about assessment?

50% of students fail to graduate from Community Colleges (Institutional assessment)

45% pass rate on remedial math (Departmental assessment–course specific)

2/3 of the Community College student population who wishes to transfer does not

What do we do at CCP already with assessment?

Institutional Research is done (i.e., but data appears to be disconnected from course, departments’ and instructors’ daily activities)

Departments and/or Programs build their own efforts of assessment for better student outcomes (i.e., at the student level: entering and exiting student interviews provide useful feedback for course/program changes; at the instructor level: evaluation of Instructor performance–a rather sensitive topic-is a form of assessment when done well–each dept./program uses different approaches for peer evaluation and sensitivity comes into place in terms of reliability of the instrument used as well as biases and differentiation in evaluation when more than one instructor is asked to evaluate classes)

Sharing information on teaching practices among colleagues (i.e., use of assessment techniques in classroom–questions at the end of a class to see if students have learned new material; comprehension checks throughout presentation of new material; class-transitions, especially in the beginning of the class to activate schemata; games at the end of class where students [in groups] test each other on new material, etc.)

Curriculum Facilitation work (doesn’t really reach all Faculty)

What have we learned from these efforts?

Overall, CCP is doing a lot with assessment as stated in #2; however, those efforts appear to be disconnected.

What more do we need to do?

to serve best the students, CCP needs to find out reasons for which students take courses; orient students –in terms of time management and organizational skills as well as student learning styles;

provide students with ease of getting information as to where they need to go for different types of information

(more) assessment needs to be done on a course/class basis
need to work more closely with high schools to target students left behind in material, especially with core courses (English/Math)

How can we accomplish the "more" that we need to do?

Develop a well-thought orientation session (in-session and/or on-line) for students coming into the school where time management skills and student learning styles are addressed.

Provide some form of certification that ensures that students have taken this orientation session prior to taking courses at CCP.

Implement (again?) the old system of “asterisk” next to students’ names on class lists to inform instructors about student activity regarding how often they have attempted to take the course. That will give the Instructor the opportunity to open a dialog with students who may have problems with the respective courses.

More Instructor training is needed on teaching vs. learning styles especially for targeted courses (Math/English)