1. Is there a specific assessment plan for the Essential Learning Outcomes (ELOs)?

Yes. And based on our experience so far, we will make it more detailed.
We planned from the start to define and measure two or three ELOs per year until we had completed initial measurements and reports for at least six ELOs by the end of the four years. To accomplish this, we planned to create faculty teams to define, measure, and report on the findings for ELO.
In the beginning, we were uncertain about what the measures would look like and what the results might be. Now that we have some experience with the first three measures, we can develop the plan in greater detail, better anticipating results and planning the follow-up.

We’re on schedule for the first three ELOs (writing, critical thinking, and development of consciousness), and we’re poised to continue with two more (holistic thinking and teamwork) this year. As we create the faculty teams to measure the additional ELOs, we will continue the faculty work on the first three.

2. You mention that the ELO’s are now in their 13th revision!!! When will “enough be enough”?

Actually, the initial ELOs have remained largely unchanged. “Revision” was not the best choice of words. The “revisions” focused mainly on precise wording, often the result of efforts to define and measure each ELO. We expected to tweak the wording as we delved more deeply into each one, and we did. (Alverno continues to refine the wording of its eight abilities, even after 45 years.) That said, it’s time to cast these at least in plaster if not stone. Any further proposed changes will be treated skeptically.

3. A project plan to completion: “Remember a plan can be revised but without a plan that details specific goals, the actions to meet the goals, who is responsible for each action, and the deadline for the action the team can easily be drawn to other competing responsibilities and the project drifts.”

We still need to address this satisfactorily. We created a Gantt chart from the original four-year plan with which we started, but we have not updated this or revised the chart based on the progress and changes of the last two years. We would like to make this our focus during the Mid-Point Roundtable.

We also plan to create a new schedule for our Assessment Team, with two meetings each month, all-team meetings (which all team members commit to attending) and work sessions (involving team members not teaching that block (in our block curriculum, faculty sometimes find it difficult to attend extra meetings). At the end of last year, faculty teaching travel and teaching schedules made it a bit challenging to keep everyone focused on the team goals.

4. Expand visibility through communication processes: “Continue to use e-mails for announcements but now you have enough assessment work done to create a information hub for assessment on the web and/or a printed annual report.”

We’ve used multiple channels to keep the assessment project in front of the faculty. The annual Faculty Development Seminar (a four-day training for all faculty just before the academic year starts) always focuses on assessment. We also highlight our assessment work at the annual Trustees Tea at the end of each year.

We will make the assessment functions and resources more readily available to faculty online. We have an online “Faculty Resources” with an “Assessment” tab that links to many resources. But we plan a separate page for assessment, organized around key initiatives and concepts for the faculty to use as a reference.

5. Find and/or create some successes.

We’ve done this with respect to the writing and critical thinking ELOs. We presented data to all the faculty showing where we stand on these two ELOs and asked them to interpret the results and suggest improvements.

In addition, at the end of this past year, in a joint meeting of the faculty and the board of trustees, we gave cash awards to four individual faculty and two awards to academic programs for excellence in assessment. These awards, funded by the chair of our board of trustees, proved to be a fun, highly visible way to celebrate success.

6. Involve students and co-curricular staff.

We have involved students in several ways. We hosted an open meeting for students for comments on the Essential Learning Outcomes (in the spring of 2016). We’ve met multiple times with the student government. We’ve also had several meetings with the Student Life staff. These meetings led to creating a dynamic co-curricular team that has set goals, collected data, and begun interpreting that data in light of the University’s ELOs (more on this below).

We’re proud of this achievement during the first two years and plan to continue reinforcing it.

2. We have a team of faculty responsible for promoting assessment across campus.
Of the eight faculty who attended the original meeting of the Fall 2015 Assessment Academy, seven have continued on the team, meeting bi-weekly throughout last year. Four team members led additional ad hoc faculty teams focused on developing specific ELOs.

3. Assessment team members visited two innovative institutions with interesting and useful approaches to assessment: Alverno College and Evergreen State College, and attended a regional one-day conference on Co-Curricular Assessment

These events have greatly enriched our project by providing a broader view of assessing student learning.

The Alverno College summer workshop gave us an inspiring vision of how to apply assessment in a rigorous, granular way (it also provided an opportunity for a great meeting with our Mentor, Peggy Bloom, at a Milwaukee restaurant). Evergreen gave us a unique perspective on creating and assessing learning communities and linked courses.

Also, our recently appointed Provost, the Dean of Student Life, the Director of the Student Success Center, and members of the Assessment Team and Student Life department attended a regional conference in April 2017 on co-curricular assessment, featuring guest speaker Linda Suskie, which focused on establishing and measuring co-curricular learning objectives and using the resulting data in assessment.

4. At the beginning of this year we hired a full-time Director of Evaluation, one of whose duties will be to help carry out this project.
This strengthens our assessment infrastructure and further demonstrates our commitment to assessment.

5. We have defined and measured baseline data for 3 of our 9 Essential Learning Outcomes. We have reported back data on two of these — writing and critical thinking. And we’re preparing to measure and collect data on two more — holistic (integrative) thinking and teamwork.
During the four-day Faculty Development Seminar in this past August,

• We told faculty how are students are doing in writing and critical thinking according to data we collected last spring.
• As a practical exercise, we asked faculty to calibrate their ratings of student work in each of these two outcome areas.
• And we gave faculty strategies for teaching writing and critical thinking more effectively — including bringing a guest speaker from a college in Louisiana who gave faculty a framework for writing assignments.

6. We have guided all the departments in developing intended learning outcomes for their programs. (For simplicity and focus, we set a limit of five outcomes for a program.)
All programs now have learning outcomes, and they committed last year to measuring at least two of the five this past spring. We’re now reviewing their reports. The key thing is that faculty have learned how to write clear and measurable program outcomes.

7. At the end of the 2016-17 academic year we gave six awards—four individual and two program level—to individuals and programs which demonstrated excellence in program or classroom assessment. The awards carried nicely framed awards and generous cash prizes—$750 for each of the faculty and $1000 for each program.
As mentioned above, we presented these awards at the annual faculty-trustees dessert, perhaps the most visible and well attended of faculty gatherings. The awards served two purposes — (a) to acknowledge and reward faculty who are using assessment effectively to improve student learning, and (b) to demonstrate that assessment is vitally important in the university.

8. Our focus on classroom and program assessment has spawned a thorough co-curricular assessment process, which has already had one cycle of data collection, interpretation, and improvement.
One member of our Assessment Team (previously the chair of our education department) started a new job as Director of the Student Success Center in the Student Life department, bringing her strong background in education and assessment.

The Dean of Student Life wanted to understand how her department would benefit from clearer goals and better assessments. The two of them have teamed up and, working with the entire department, they’ve created a list of desired outcomes and outcome measures for all co-curricular areas they’re responsible for. At the end of the last academic year, they reviewed the data they’d collected and considered how better to achieve their goals. We’re pleased that co-curricular assessment has become an integral part of what we do.

1. Making assessment more habit than hard work.
We’ve shown ourselves what can be done in the name of assessment in three areas — writing, critical thinking, and development of consciousness — through a lot of focus and effort. Now we need to ensure that assessment and improvement in these three areas continues and gets easier for all involved. For this we need to figure out how to build regular checks and feedback loops into standard operating procedure, so faculty can adjust their teaching and learning designs in order to see steady improvements in these areas.

We’re looking at assessment management software and institutional policies and procedures to build in regular assessment processes, data collection and archiving, and documented improvement so that assessment becomes more good habit than hard work.

2. Building an assessment information hub.
Apropos the suggestion by our mentor referred to above, we need to create a one-stop shopping assessment website for faculty — one site faculty can go to for resources and information about roles and responsibilities.

3. Making program assessment effective.
Our assessment initiative has three interrelated dimensions: classroom assessment, program (and learning community) assessment, and institutional assessment.
Because program assessment bridges classroom and institutional assessment, it may be the most important for achieving the larger aims of student learning and growth.
We’ve asked programs to measure two of their five program learning outcomes. We expect we’ll need several meetings with program faculty and several years to see high-quality program assessment across all departments. This will need continued attention to reap the benefits. We see challenge and opportunity here: challenge because it’s complex, opportunity because it’s not as difficult as institutional assessment to do well.

4. Integrating research and classroom practice that support development of consciousness.
Development of consciousness, the signature pedagogy of Maharishi University, has been shown empirically to significantly benefit student learning. We have a long history of research in this area, though historically this research has not been directly connected to our assessment project.
Last year we developed a pedagogical approach to help faculty develop assignments and classroom interactions around personal development, including development of consciousness. We need to keep both the classroom practices and institutional research on development of consciousness in the same big picture of institutional assessment to ensure we continue progressing in both research and practice.

• We have an engaged Assessment Team that manages our assessment efforts across campus.
• We also have a larger group of assessment liaisons, one for each of eight departments, many of whom are also on the Assessment Team.
• We have created three teams of faculty to articulate each of the first three Essential Learning Outcomes we focused on last year.
• We are about to create two more teams to articulate the ELOs of “holistic thinking” and “teamwork.”
• We’ve have taken the Essential Learning Outcomes to both the student government and a broader open meeting of students.
• We have engaged the entire faculty in workshops on the following topics:
  • Creating student learning charts and writing intended outcome statements
  • Analyzing data on program learning outcomes and writing the annual program report
  • Choosing measures and collecting evidence of program learning outcomes
  • Consolidating and expressing student learning outcomes
  • Teaching for essential learning outcomes.
• We have collaborated with Iowa State’s Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching to develop a “Thinkspace” site to support faculty’s creation of Student Learning Charts. This site was the topic of a full faculty development seminar.
• We’ve described our “Student Learning Improvement Project” to the trustees in written reports and an in-person presentation.
• Yet to come: We plan to present the assessment project to the administrative staff in October and solicit their input.

We are planning to bring seven or eight people to Oakbrook and to come away from the Roundtable with the momentum for a strong finish.