Developing Assessment Plans: the Process, the Template, the Attitude

Institutions of higher learning have been challenged to assess institutional learning
outcomes (ILO) for both accountability to accreditation agencies and improvement of
student learning. Central to the collecting and analyzing data that leads to the recursive
process of assessment is the involvement of faculty. Faculty are resistant to assessment of
ILO in part because they lack a data method that allows extrapolation beyond assigning a
grade. Developing an assessment plan requires the collaboration between faculty and
administration where direct measures of assessment in the classroom can be used to
demonstrate progress of student learning. The faculty and administration at Kalamazoo
Valley Community College worked together to create an assessment plan that used an
assessment template to collect and analyze data along with a feedback rubric to be used
as part of the peer review process in the assessment plan. Once the assessment template was used for a semester the faculty were surveyed about their attitudes toward the use of a template as well as their general attitudes towards the overall assessment process. The results of the survey suggest that while there is still resistance to assessment the use of a template helps to decrease the resistance.