End of term assessment reports

My end of term course level assessment reports are posted on the college web site. Some of the thinking underneath the structure of my current assessment efforts are laid out in a presentation I gave in 2006. This term I looked at attendance across multiple terms, and the fall 2009 term end reports on student learning in statistics and physical science.

New subsections in the physical science report include a look at whether writing improved across the term and the results of a survey of what was the student's favorite and least favorite laboratory.

I also updated the ethnobotany course assessment portal. The portal is designed to be used as an interactive exploration of work done by the class this term with references to past experiences in [square brackets]. While this is not a direct measurement of student learning, I have argued that this provides a course level portfolio assessment. Although indirect, the outcome, "Students will be able to communicate and describe the healing uses of local plants and the cultural contexts in which that healing occurs," is arguably well evidenced by online evidence. The web page provides photographic evidence of a student accomplishing that particular outcome.

Video would provide a more direct form of evidence in ethnobotany, but videos that spanned all activities over the whole term could not be stored on servers nor transmitted over our limited bandwidth networks. The videos would be DVDs sitting in MITC essentially unused and available only to those who can physically access MITC. Photographic web pages are compact, can be stored, and can be transmitted over our networks. These pages are available both to future sections of the course, students on other campuses, even globally.This term all photographic documentation for both ethnobotany and physical science was moved to a Blogger blog.