Advancing Assessment for Student Success: Supporting Learning by Creating Connections Across Assessment, Teaching, Curriculum, and Cocurriculum in Collaboration With Our Colleagues and Our Students

This book is about student success and how to support and improve it. It takes as its point of departure that we--as faculty, assessment directors, student affairs professionals, and staff--reflect together in a purposeful and informed way about how our teaching, curricula, the co-curriculum, and assessment work in concert to support and improve student learning and success. It also requires that we do so in collaboration with our colleagues and our students for the rich insights that we gain from them.

Conversational in style, this book offers a wide variety of illustrations of how your peers are putting assessment into practice in ways that are meaningful to them and their institutions, and that lead to improved student learning. The authors provide rich guidance for activities ranging from everyday classroom teaching and assessment to using assessment to improve programs and entire institutions.

The authors envisage individual faculty at four-year institutions and community colleges as their main audience, whether those faculty are focused on their own classes or support their colleagues through leadership roles in assessment. If you plan to remain focused on your own courses and students, you will find that those sections of this book will help you better understand why and how assessment leaders do what they do, which in turn will make your participation in assessment more engaging and increase your expertise in facilitating student learning. Because the authors also aim to strengthen connections between the curriculum and co-curriculum and include examples of co-curricular assessment, student affairs professionals and staff interested in doing the same will also find ideas in this book relevant to their work.

Opening with a chapter on equity in assessment practice, so critical to learning from and benefitting our diverse students, the authors guide you through the development and use of learning outcomes, the design of assignments with attention to clear prompts and rubrics, and the achievement of alignment and coherence in pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment to better support student engagement, achievement and success. The chapter on using student evidence for improvement offers support, resources, and recommendations for doing so, and demonstrates exciting uses of student wisdom.

The book concludes by emphasizing the importance of reflection in assessment practices--offering powerful examples and strategies for professional development--and by describing appropriate, creative, and effective approaches for communicating assessment information with attention to purpose and audience.

Amy Driscoll retired fromCalifornia State University, Monterey Bay as the founding Director of Teaching,Learning, and Assessment and from Portland State University as Director ofCommunity/University Partnerships. For the last 11 years, she has coordinatedand taught in the Assessment Leadership Academy, a year-long program forfaculty and administrators, and consulted nationally and internationally. Sheco-authored Developing Outcomes-basedAssessment for Learner-centered Education: A Faculty Introduction withSwarup Wood in 2007.

Swarup Wood is Professor ofChemistry and currently serves as Interim Director of General Education andCoordinator of First Year Seminar at California State University Monterey Baywhere he has worked since 1997. Heco-authored Developing Outcomes-basedAssessment for Learner-centered Education: A Faculty Introduction with AmyDriscoll in 2007.

Dan Shapiro currently serves as theInterim Associate Vice President for Academic Programs and Dean of UniversityCollege and Graduate Studies at California State University, Monterey Bay(CSUMB). He has worked at CSUMB since 1997, beginning as a lecturer and afaculty associate in the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Assessment(TLA)--when Amy was the director. He started serving as director of TLA in2014. He is a graduate of the WSCUC Assessment Leadership Academy (ALA, CohortVII) and coordinates the ALA professional mentoring program.

Nelson Graff currently serves asProfessor and Director of Communication Across the Disciplines, teachingfirst-year reading/writing and supporting faculty around CSUMB in teachingreading and writing in their classes. Before that, he was an associateprofessor of English Education at San Francisco State University, preparingfuture secondary English teachers.

Peggy L. Maki, PhD in literature and linguistics, University of Delaware, writes, speaks about, and consults with higher education organizations and institutions on the process of assessing student learning, an internally motivated and shared commitment to currently enrolled students’ equitable progress toward achieving high-quality learning outcomes.

She has consulted at over 610 institutions in the United States and abroad and has written books and articles on assessment for more than 20 years. Her previous book, Real-Time Student Assessment: Meeting the Imperative for Improved Time to Degree, Closing the Opportunity Gap, and Assuring Student Competencies for 21st-Century Needs (Stylus, 2017), challenges institutions to prioritize the use of chronological assessment results to benefit enrolled students compared with the more common practice of prolonged assessment cycles that generally benefit future students.

She served as the former American Association for Higher Education’s (AAHE) senior scholar on assessment; a consultant in the Association of American Colleges & Universities’ (AAC&U’s) annual General Education and Assessment Institutes; and a member of several advisory boards, including one for the Lumina Foundation.

Currently, she serves on the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA) advisory board. Recently an accredited organization in the United Kingdom invited her to design and teach online professional development courses and workshops among those it offers worldwide to higher education. She is the recipient of a national teaching award, the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching.