Shorter version
This year, we’re working with a new SLO process, which includes both updated SLOs and a reliance on individual faculty to assess the SLOs in their courses (see Background, at the end of this post, if you’re interested in how that came about).
For the composition courses, you’ll still report the SLOs to the comp coordinator (me), and I’ll enter them in aggregate into TracDat, our SLO recording software. But we will no longer be reporting scores from the (no longer existent) shared department final.
Longer Version
The SLOs
As I said, we’ve updated our SLOs; here’s a list of them for all the composition classes (
Word DOC |
PDF ). The ones that are
underlined and bold are the ones we’ve chosen to asses this semester. (I’ve listed those below.)
(Note that I sent a copy of these out at the very beginning of the semester, when announcing the department’s SLO meeting during Convocation Week this semester, so hopefully this isn’t the first time you’ve seen them.)
ENGL 105: Upon completion of this course, students will use reading strategies to understand texts.
ENGL 51 and 56: Upon completion of this course, students will compose a clearly-written, well-organized, purpose-driven analysis.
ENGL 1A: Upon completion of this course, students will synthesize evidence from outside sources to support claims effectively.
ENGL 1B: 1. Upon completion of the course, students will evaluate a literary text for its use of genre conventions.
ENGL 1C: Upon completion of the course, students will be able to evaluate arguments for validity and soundness.
Assessment
During our discussions at the end of the last semester, and then again during Convocation Week, we agreed that each faculty member would assess the students’ fulfilling (or not) the expectations of the identified SLO.
In most cases (ENGL 105 might be an exception), we recommended (but do not require) that you use an assignment from late enough in the semester that they’d have had the opportunity to learn what they need in order to fulfill the SLO. Further, the idea is
not to created a dedicated assignment to measure the SLO (though you may, if you prefer); the idea is to assess the SLO within an assignment you already are requiring.
English 105 measures students ability to “use reading strategies to understand texts.” There’s (unfortunately, but perhaps unavoidably) some ambiguity there: an essay that demonstrates understanding might imply that reading strategies were used, so you could use an essay as the assessment method. But any exercise that lets you assess their ability to understand a text using reading strategies (T-charts, annotations, etc.) would be acceptable.
Reporting
At the end of the semester, for any of the composition courses, I’ll send out a Google Form (or something like it) to collect your results, which I will then put in TracDat in aggregate. (I’m not sure if we used to do this with ENGL 1B and 1C, since we did not have a common final for those classes, but I plan to include them this time). All I will need to know is (a) how many students met your expectations on the SLO, and (b) how many did not. The judgment as to whether the student passed the SLO is up to you.
Improving the process
Our discussions at the end of last year, and at the beginning of this year, were useful but, in many ways, ambiguous. The fundamental point is that SLOs are primarily useful for the conversations they provoke; given the ambiguity around the process for this semester, I expect that a lot of conversation will indeed be provoked.
For example, leaving both assessment method and evaluation completely up to each faculty member might create some “apples to oranges” issues. I understand that. But I also know that the more we tried to come to agreement on various issues–for example, the definition of “synthesize” or even “outside sources”–the more mired down in unhelpful detail we got. My hope is that, armed with some experience–insights, frustrations, etc.–we’ll be able to hone our process and our expectations, both of the students and of ourselves.
Background
Over the past several years, the department had been frustrated with our SLO assessment and discussion. There were two main problems:
- Our SLOs themselves were not very helpful; they had so many parts to them that it was hard to pull meaningful information–about our students’ needs, about our teaching, etc.–out of the results.
- The holistically scored final had several positive outcomes (most notably, getting the whole department together to discuss norms and expectations), but it was a high-demand process that wasn’t giving us meaningful SLO information–and one of our main justifications for the final was SLO assessment.
So we decided to jettison the holistically scored final, rewrite the SLOs, and put each faculty member in charge of assessing whether the students met the SLO or not.
This is our first year with the new process, which I would say is probably still under construction, to some extent. We will have meetings to discuss the SLOs, and the SLO process, at the end of the semester, during the time that used to be used for holistically scoring the final.
