Chairs Meeting Memo December 2013

To:      Department Chairs

From:  Valerie Lehr

RE:      Assessment

Date:   November 12, 2013

Our December Department Chairs meeting will be devoted primarily to discussing the assessment methods that are being used by different departments in order to help departments to think about what is possible. In addition to your own attendance, please ask another member of your department who has been involved in assessment to attend the meeting.

I ask that before the meeting each department complete the following:

1)  Explore the assessment website.  You might start by reading the summary paper that I wrote about the different assessment methods that departments have used. Be sure to click through the different sections of the paper;

2)  Review your learning goals and identify one or two for which you would like to assess learning. If you have courses that meet particularly important learning goals, you might focus on assessing these courses;

3)  Based on what you see that other departments have done, identify two approaches that you are interested in learning about and send a message to me by December 2nd in which you tell me the assessment approaches your department is interested in learning about;

4)  In addition to thinking about what you want to know, please also think about what you have learned about assessment that you think should be passed on.

Finally, I will also bring an outline of assessment tools we use institutionally that the assessment committee believes could be valuable for individual departments.

By March 30, I will ask that your department/program outline a four-year assessment plan, one that will allow you to assess multiple learning goals over that time period. As I have said in the past, I remain committed to us learning to do assessment in ways that produce results, but that recognize time constraints. I am also committed to identifying resources to support this work.