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 from California State University, Monterey Bay as the founding Director of Teaching, Learning, and Assessment and from Portland State University as Director of Community/University Partnerships. For the last 11 years, she has coordinated and taught in the Assessment Leadership Academy, a year-long program for faculty and administrators, and consulted nationally and internationally. She co-authored Developing Outcomes-based Assessment for Learner-centered Education: A Faculty Introduction with Swarup Wood in 2007. Swarup Wood is Professor of Chemistry and currently serves as Interim Director of General Education and Coordinator of First Year Seminar at California State University Monterey Bay where he has worked since 1997. He co-authored Developing Outcomes-based Assessment for Learner-centered Education: A Faculty Introduction with Amy Driscoll in 2007. Dan Shapiro currently serves as the Interim Associate Vice President for Academic Programs and Dean of University College and Graduate Studies at California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB). He has worked at CSUMB since 1997, beginning as a lecturer and a faculty associate in the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Assessment (TLA)--when Amy was the director. He started serving as director of TLA in 2014. He is a graduate of the WSCUC Assessment Leadership Academy (ALA, Cohort VII) and coordinates the ALA professional mentoring program. Nelson Graff currently serves as Professor and Director of Communication Across the Disciplines, teaching first-year reading/writing and supporting faculty around CSUMB in teaching reading and writing in their classes. Before that, he was an associate professor of English Education at San Francisco State University, preparing future 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 proce
