University of Nebraska Kearney

IN THIS ISSUE:  

Assessment Awards Luncheon  

E-Portfolios  

Value Rubrics 

E-Portfolio Project  

Online Resources  

Assessment Awards Luncheon  

The Assessment Awards Luncheon was held on Tuesday, March 6, 2012, in the NSU Cedar Room. Faculty members who prepare department and program reports were invited to attend and were recognized for their outstanding work on assessment over the last year. The following awards were presented to departments and individuals for their exemplary contributions to assessment at UNK.

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Measuring Student Progress with E-Portfolios 

Peer Review Vol. 13, No. 4/Vol. 14, No. 1 Fall 2011/Winter 2012 

 
By J. Elizabeth Clark, professor of English, LaGuardia Community College; Bret Eynon, assistant dean, Center for Teaching and Learning, LaGuardia Community College  

 Faculty, students, and administrators are engaged in exciting new conversations about definitions of educational progress. While many faculty have long used rubrics to measure student achievement in a course or on a specific assignment, institutions are increasingly using rubrics to assess authentic student learning based on student-produced work connected to larger institutional outcomes. Because of the national, collaborative work in creating the Association of American Colleges and Universities’ VALUE rubrics, these rubrics lend themselves to extending the conversation about work in individual courses, in programs and majors, in institutions, and across institutions.

Academic Pathways Through Higher Education  

The flexibility of the VALUE rubrics allows them to be used in different segments of higher education and adapted to serve multiple purposes. Students are the ultimate stakeholders and beneficiaries, and so a key national issue in higher education today is helping students to see a clear pathway to graduation and to achieving their personal academic and vocational goals.

Too often, students see their overall education as a disconnected series of courses and experiences. Situating a wide range of skills and areas of knowledge over a four-year scale, institutions can use the VALUE rubrics to help students see how their skills and knowledge build sequentially over time, from course to course, and sometimes, from institution to institution.

Natalie McKnight explains that in Boston University’s College of General Studies (CGS) “The rubric is important because it makes faculty and students more conscious of what we are trying to accomplish; knowing and discussing our goals enables us to reach them more successfully. Plus students, faculty, and administrators can use the rubric as a gauge to assess the impact of our program, something we can all benefit from knowing.” She adds, “Articulating goals and then evaluating how well one has achieved those goals are essential to progress and learning in any field. The VALUE rubrics have played a key role in that process for us, as have e-portfolios.

For the complete article, click here 

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How Reliable Are the VALUE Rubrics?   

Vol. 13, No. 4/Vol. 14, No. 1 Fall 2011/Winter 2012

By Ashley P. Finley, senior director of assessment, AAC&U 

 The VALUE reliability study was developed to gather data on the usability and transferability of rubrics both within and across institutions. This study was also designed to address the degree of reliability and consensus in scoring across faculty from different disciplinary backgrounds. Reliability data were gathered and analyzed for three of the fifteen existing VALUE rubrics—critical thinking, integrative learning, and civic engagement.

The effectiveness of assessment instruments is commonly evaluated by the degree to which validity and reliability can be established. Instruments should, therefore, both accurately capture the intended outcome (validity) and be able to do so consistently (reliability). Because validity is often harder to establish than reliability, it is preferable for assessments to contain multiple forms of validity. In important ways the rubric development process itself provided the VALUE rubrics with substantial degrees of two types of validity. First, because the VALUE rubrics were created nationally by teams of faculty, those people closest to student learning and outcomes assessment on campuses, the rubrics hold a high degree of face validity. The face validity of the rubrics is apparent in the scale of interest and circulation of the rubrics to date, as evidenced by the approximately eleven thousand people from over three thousand institutions and organizations, international and domestic, who have logged in on the AAC&U VALUE web page to access the rubrics.

 
Second, the specific employment of faculty experts in particular outcome areas to populate the development teams provides the rubrics with additional content validity. Experts are commonly used to establish content validity to verify that “the measure covers the full range of the concept’s meaning” (Chambliss and Schutt 2003, 69).

The objectives for establishing national reliability estimates for the VALUE rubrics were two-fold. One, because the rubrics were created nationally and interdisciplinarily, we sought to emulate this procedure in order to establish a cross-disciplinary reliability score for each rubric. Two, we also sought to establish reliability scores within disciplines to examine the range of similarities and differences across faculty from different disciplinary backgrounds. 

 For complete article, click here  

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2011-2012 Assessment Project  

Using e-Portfolios for Departmental Assessment  

The General Studies Program began implementation of e-portfolios for collecting, analyzing and reporting assessment data in September, 2010 in all Portal courses. TaskStream is the e-portfolio system being used since it was already being used by College of Education students in Teacher Education for the last three years.

All students at UNK will be required to purchase a TaskStream license when they begin their GS portal course and will be using it for all their GS courses. This means that students in all departments will have TaskStream available for assessment purposes within their majors.

To encourage the use of TaskStream by departments, the Office of Assessment will be providing incentives to departments who begin implementation of e-portfolios for assessment of their majors in 2011.  

The incentive to begin using e-portfolios in your assessment process will be a $500 award to the department when the process is started and you are ready to start collecting documents/projects from students in TaskStream (this would include students purchasing the license for TaskStream; $500 to the individual responsible for running the project; and another $500 to the department when the first data are collected and implementation is completed.  

There are many advantages to students and to departments in using e-portfolios for assessment and I think this would fit in well with the assessment process many departments already have in place. To access more information about the use of e-portfolios in academia you can review the resources provided in the next section, including examples of e-portfolios used at other institutions.  

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Resources for Developing E-Portfolios  

Get an Overview of the Topic  

See Examples  

Access Presentations  

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