Assessment Home

Assessment Toolbox

Printable Forms & Timelines

Assessment Team

Getting Started with Program Assessment

Assessment Champions

Assessment Toolbox —

Looking for ideas or tips?
These links will help you assess student learning

Program/Discipline Level Assessment

• Busy Chairperson's Guide to Assessment — This one really does answer all those pesky questions like "How can I add assessment to the already busy schedules of my faculty and students?" (Sec. 10). Although this specifically targets the needs of Southeast Missouri State University, it addresses a lot of common problems and issues.
• PROGRAM-Based Review and Assessment: Tools and Techniques for Program Improvement — A rich resouce published online by the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. This work takes apart the process of program assessment and examines it systematically, enabling users to follow the concrete examples and the detailed pro and con analyses, and thus make choices that will be most effective for their own programs.
• Mid-South Community College Report of Assessment of Student Achievement 2005-2006 — This is the final institutional report, showing all of the information regarding how Mid-South's various division's met or did not meet their goals for the year. As such it offers good examples of how to present program information.
• Teaching and Learning Online: Communication, Community and Assessment — Another useful resource published online by the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. This one addresses a particularly thorny assessment issue, at least in part — assessment of online classes. Not as hands on as the other UMass handbooks, at least in the Assessment section, this one at least considers this underexamined issue.
• University of Central Florida's Program Assessment Handbook — a "big picture" guide to the program assessment process that explains the why and the what as well as the how.
• Western Carolina University's Handbook for Program Assessment — a complete handbook that details both why the process should be undertaken as well as providing very specific guidelines about how to do it, write down to word-level suggestions for effective goal statements, etc.
• Career and Technical Programs Program Assessment Guide - Glendale Community College — a particularly helpful FAQs page, methods section, 5-column model, and example using a nursing program.
• Guidelines for Program Assessment - Developing an Assessment Plan for Your Program — St. Olaf's College produced this very helpful guide to thinking through the process of developing a program assessment.
• Data for Program Assessment — a step-by-step guide to thinking through the data necessary to support program assessment. Prepared for the engineering program at North Caroline State University.

Course Level Assessment

• COURSE-Based Review and Assessment: Methods for Understanding Student Learning A wonderful resource published online by the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. This handbook walks users through the process of thinking out and developing assessments from start to finish, including the reasoning process behind the choices they need to make.
• Southern Illinois University - Edwardsville: Classroom Assessment Techniques — a terrific site filled with specific strategies, answers to frequent questions (such as why "Do" assessment, etc.)
• University of Wisconsin - Madison: Assessment Manual— includes a comprehensive variety of departmental and institutional level techniques.
• North Carolina State University - Internet Resources for Higher Education Outcomes Assessment— A rich collection of web links that will direct you to solid resources. This information on this site is frequently updated.
• Penn State University Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching: Assessment and Consultations — a useful set of resources, including examples, links, and theory. One section is devoted to the special problems of assessing large classes.
• Kathy Shrock's Guide for Educators: Teacher Helpers - Assessment & Rubric Information — a wealth of practical information on developing rubrics and assessment tools
• Teachervision.com: Creating Rubrics: Inspire Your Students and Foster Critical Thinking — demonstrates how a single rubric can be applied to a variety of subject areas with only modest changes.
• Texas Center for Education Technology: Rubrics — a large collection of articles about rubrics, lots of models of both general and specific rubrics (especially those targeting technical expertise), and several rubric generators.
• FAST — Free Assessment Summary Tool. An easy online assessment tool you can use to get feedback from your students to see how well they are comprehending material. Note: Because this tool is fully anonymous, it is possible to submit responses multiple times, so while it is acceptable for snapshots of comprehension, it's limitations must be kept firmly in mind. Another free assessment tool, Student Assessment of Learning Gains (SALG) takes the opposite approach and makes it possible for the instructor to determine which students have responded because students are assigned specific identification numbers. Thus the privacy of responses becomes an issue.

Subject Specific Assessment Links

• The Math Forum at Drexel University — Assessment and Testing
• The University of Illinois UC - Center for Teaching Excellence - Unit Outcomes Assessment Plans — the individual program assessment plans of different units of the University of Illinois
• The University of Georgia's Approved Undergraduate Assessment Plans — individual program assessment plans for each individual department of UGa.
• The University of Maryland University College Program Assessment Plans — detailed plans for each unit of university
• Arapahoe Community College — 5 years worth of specific program assessments.
• Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology's (ABET) Accreditation Criteria — includes outcomes and assessment criteria for technology, computer and engineering programs.
• American Psychological Association's (APA) Assessment Cyberguide — detailed information for psychology departments about how to develop program assessments in psychology, looking at topic specific issues as well as considering what types of techniques work best to provide usable assessment data. Of interest to faculty outside of psychology may be the link to Drew C. Appleby's essay on helping students understand curriculum goals.

Database Resources

Several databases offer rich troves of information on student learning assessment. In order to use them effectively, think carefully about the keywords you use. Remember that certain words will appear in almost every citation, so be specific and consider whether today's jargon might have had different "code words" a few years ago. "Rubrics" or "muddiest point" are going to be significantly more useful terms than either "student" or "education". Also, enclose phrases in quotation marks: "classroom assessment techniques". Most databases will then search the terms as a unit rather than as separate words.

• The EbscoHost Professional Collection. Ebsco's Academic Search Premier Database is also rich in education-related content. Both are available through the DACC Library's home page
• Practical Assessment Research and Evaluation online journal
• ERIC Digests — short reports on educational subjects
• ERIC — accessible through both EbscoHost and FirstSearch on the Library's Home Page.

Discussion Lists

Subscribe to discussion lists by sending an email message to the listserver. Make sure to turn off any automatic signature file you may use. In most cases, you will want to leave the subject line blank and put the following text into the body of the message (substituting your own name where appropriate): subscribe list-name your-first-name your-last-name

• ASSESS — Listserver: listserv@lsv.uky.edu (University of Kentucky-Lexington). Topic: assessment in higher education.
  
• FYA-List — Listserver: listserv@vm.sc.edu (University of South Carolina). Topic: evaluating students' experiences and success in the first year of college.
  
• ASSESS-W — Listserver: listserv@listserv.louisville.edu (University of Louisville). Topic: assessing writing.
  
• PORTFOLIO-L — Listserver: listserv@henson.cc.kzoo.edu (Kalamazoo College). Topic: portfolio assessment.
  

If you become aware of other links or resources that you'd like to recommend be added to this web site, contact Ruth Lindemann at 443-8735 or Email the Library.

Revised March 10, 2008