IN THIS ISSUE: 

 Assessment Awards Luncheon 

 Using E-Portfolios 

 Engaging Students  

 E-Portfolio Project 

 Online Resources 

Assessment Awards Luncheon  

The Assessment Awards Luncheon was held on Tuesday, March 1, 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.

Award of Appreciation Daren Snider, Director of General Studies    Exemplary Contributions to Assessment General Studies    Focused Assessments English     Most Improved Assessment Reporting English    Rapid Response Award Business Education   e-Portfolio Implementation General Studies * Art * Communication * Social Work  * Psychology    Curriculum Mapping FSID * Art * Physics * Social Work    Chemistry * Theater * Criminal Justice

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 Using E-Portfolios to Support an Undergraduate Learning Career: An Experiment with Academic Advising  

By Helen L. Chen and Thomas C. Black 

"Our country is rearing a group of intelligent young men and women with lots of skills and enthusiasm but little self-knowledge."
— Tim Henderson, The 20-Something Dilemma, Inside Higher Ed, October 21, 2010 

Recent years have seen growing interest in electronic learning portfolios (e-portfolios) as a tool to support student learning across higher education in both public and private colleges and universities (Figure 1). The concept of an e-portfolio is multifaceted — it is a technology, a pedagogical approach, and a process, as well as a product. Its purpose can range from tracking development within a program to finding a job or monitoring performance. 

Figure 1. Growth in ePortfolio Services Across Educational Sectors, 2003–2010²
Courtesy of The Campus Computing Project, 2010 

The e-portfolio efforts at Stanford have been widely distributed across schools and departments on campus. While many of these projects, courses, and programs have not formally used the term "e-portfolio," most share similar themes that are broadly related to capturing and documenting aspects of a student's learning and engaging in some form of reflection, rationale building, or planning, depending on the discipline. These activities contribute to a culture of folio thinking, a pedagogical approach that focuses on designing structured opportunities for students to create e-portfolios and reflect on their learning experiences.³ Instead of prioritizing e-portfolio technology, folio thinking addresses the adoption and integration of e-portfolio praxis in existing contexts as a critical first step toward a successful implementation that can lead to wider scalability and longer-term sustainability of the e-portfolio initiative. 

The full article can be viewed at: 

http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Quarterly/EDUCAUSEQuarterlyMagazineVolum/UsingEPortfoliostoSupportanUnd/219102 

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Working with Students to Promote Engagement in  

Departmental and University-Wide Assessment 

Kenneth E. Barron and Jeanne Butler 

In Promoting student engagement: Programs, techniques and opportunities.  

Syracuse, NY: Society for the Teaching of Psychology, (2011). 

We would like to share a unique approach on how we promote student engagement in assessment at our respective universities. Rather than viewing assessment as something that we do to students, we adopt an alternative view that our assessment can be significantly improved when assessment is something that we do with students. Specifically, we recruit students to take on important roles to design, collect, analyze, write up, and audit our assessment activities. As a result, students are key stakeholders who engage in all phases of our assessment programs. Our first example showcases student involvement in department-level assessment at James Madison University (JMU), and our second example showcases student involvement in university-level assessment at University of Nebraska Kearney. We conclude by highlighting benefits that our programs and students have experienced by working together on our assessment. 

Involving Students in Departmental Assessment 

            At JMU, the first author created an advanced, undergraduate psychology course on assessment and program evaluation. The purpose of this course is to train students in assessment and program evaluation and to expose students to potential careers in these areas. But more importantly, this course provides students hands-on, real-world experiences in assessment and program evaluation by working closely with our annual assessment of JMU's undergraduate psychology program. 

Involving Students in University-Wide Assessment 

            At UNK, to involve and broaden the role of students in the assessment process at the university level, the second author (who is Director of Assessment at UNK) formed a Student Assessment Committee composed of representatives from all four colleges and from student government. The committee was established to represent students’ concerns about assessment issues, provide a forum for the collection of data on areas of concern for students, and to disseminate information to educate their peers about assessment. 

The complete chapter can be accessed at: 

http://www.unk.edu/uploadedFiles/academicaffairs/Assessment/Resources/newsletters/BaronButlerFinal.pdf 

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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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