Directory of Assessment & Retention
These are the program-level student learning outcomes that are supported by the individual course. These student learning outcomes are determined by the department and cannot be altered by individual instructors. Course Objectives
These are the specific objectives of the individual course. These course objectives are determined by the department and approved by Faculty Senate and cannot be altered by individual instructors.
This field is to be filled in with the learning activities or assignments that you use in your course to help students move toward achieving the course objectives. Everyone uses different learning activities or assignments, but some examples include: lecture, videos, class discussion, reading assignments, discussion boards, voice-over PowerPoints, and case studies. These may or may not be things that you assign a grade for. For the sake of this assessment, the important thing is that they are activities or assignments that contribute to student learning. Please note, you should fill in the learning activities or assignments in the area that corresponds to the course objective(s) they support. You may find yourself repeating activities or assignments for multiple objectives – that’s ok. If you use a certain activity or assignment to support multiple course objectives, then you should list it in the areas for all of those course objectives.
This area is to be filled in with the measures through which you assess students’ achievement of the course objectives. There are two categories of measures, direct and indirect. Direct measures require students to demonstrate the specific skill, value, or knowledge described in the course objective, and allow for clear observation of the level to which students have achieved the course objective. Indirect measures suggest that students have achieved a course objective, but lack clarity in exactly what or how much students are learning. Both types of measures have a place in assessment, but you must have at least one direct measure for each course objective. MSCHE provides the following examples of direct and indirect measures of student learning:
| Direct Measures of Learning | Indirect Measures of Learning |
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Please note, you should fill in the assessment measures in the area that corresponds to the course objective(s) they measure. You may find yourself repeating assessment measures for multiple objectives – that’s ok. If you use a certain assessment measure to measure achievement of multiple course objectives, then you should list it in the areas for all of those course objectives.
Achievement targets describe the desired result of a given assessment measure, specific to an individual course objective. Targets tend to cause the most confusion during the assessment process – just remember, a target is something you aim for. So, when a given assessment measure is employed, what result is being aimed for? For example, should students be achieving a certain level of proficiency as described in a rubric, or a certain score on a set of multiple choice exam questions? As mentioned above, you may find that you are using the same assessment measure for multiple course objectives. That’s ok, but you will need to then develop multiple targets. You must have a target for each course objective/measure relationship. For example, if you were using a comprehensive exam to measure course objectives #1 and #2, you would then have two targets (each target would be listed in the area for its corresponding course objective):
It would not be enough to simply say “Students will score an average of 80% on the comprehensive exam.” because that does not tell you how well students are achieving your specific course objectives. They may have done exceptionally well with one course objective and exceptionally poorly with the other, but if you’re looking at just overall average score, per your target, it could be mistakenly assumed that students’ achievement of both course objectives is mediocre. Thus, it is important to keep in mind that targets must always be specific to both the measure and the course objectives.
Your findings should be a summary of the actual results of your assessment measures, compared to your targets. Therefore, you must have a finding for every target, and the finding should be specific to the assessment measure and the course objective. Using our example targets from above:
You can see now why it is important to write your targets and findings specific to the course objective. If our hypothetical comprehensive exam had questions equally distributed between the two objectives, the overall average score would be 77.5%. This would suggest that students were achieving our course objectives at a mediocre level, when in fact, they are achieving course objective #1 at a high level, and course objective #2 at a much lower level. This detailed information is the gold-standard of assessment and proves especially useful in completing the last section of the course assessment – the action plan.
Action plans are explanations of what changes will be made based on the findings in order to obtain improvement the next time the course is taught. Faculty members must develop action plans for each finding where the target was not met, and describe those action plans in the last section of the CAT. In certain cases, a single action plan may be used for multiple findings. For example, an action plan to completely overhaul the instructional methodology of the course may serve to improve student performance on multiple course objectives, and so could be applied to multiple findings related to those course objectives. In these cases, though, it must be clearly articulated how the action plan directly connects to each finding.