how do programs assess community college course work

What is the purpose of program assessment?

Planning at Oakton Community College in Des Plaines, Illinois. She is a Data Facilitator for Achieving the Dream; a consultantevaluator for the Higher Learning Commission; and teaches a course on institutional e ectiveness and assessment for the University of Maryland University College doctor of management in community college leadership program.

What is a community college?

assessment initiatives for courses and academic programs: Contacts at College C explain that because faculty members develop the institution’s curriculum, they also manage assessment initiatives and identify where assessment will be most useful. Academic divisions and Academic Affairs administrators at College A manage student learning ...

Do community colleges provide comprehensive advice and support?

How Do Physical Therapy Programs Assess Community College Course Work. With a 27. While an acceptance rate of 13% may seem steep, you can still be admitted. Only a minimum of 100 hours of experience and practical observations related to the field of physical therapy would suffice. Letters of recommendation should be submitted in three or four ...

What are the benefits of going to a community college?

of a course/service/program A description of the method(s) to assess performance ... Assume responsibility for your actions and work effectively as an individual and as a member of a group. 2. Express ideas with clarity, logic, and originality in both spoken and written English. ... Paradise Valley Community College’s “Assessment Handbook ...

What are the barriers to success in community college?

Community college students tend to face many serious barriers to success: low-income students are significantly overrepresented in community colleges, 8 and most need to strengthen both academic and nonacademic skills.

What is the completion agenda?

In response to low completion rates, educators, reformers, policy makers, and foundations called for a concerted effort to increase the number of individuals with college degrees and certificates —an effort that has come to be called the "completion agenda.".

What was the goal of the GI Bill?

population. The Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944 (also known as the GI Bill), the California Master Plan for Higher Education of 1960, the Higher Education Act of 1965 (which established the Pell Grant), and the rapid growth of community colleges were all designed to make college accessible for all students. They focused on reducing the cost of college to the student and, in the case of community colleges, established open-access, flexible, convenient colleges in reasonable proximity to a large majority of the population, especially including groups traditionally underrepresented in postsecondary education. At the same time, technology and the characteristics of work were also changing, resulting in increasing demand for a more educated workforce. These factors contributed to increases in college enrollment, such that by the turn of the century, over 75 percent of high school graduates had attended some postsecondary institution by their mid-twenties. 2

How to make significant institution-wide increases in completion?

To make significant institution-wide increases in completion, colleges must first focus on the appropriate measures of student success. It is important not just to measure the outcomes for the small number of students in a pilot program or intermediate outcomes that do not necessarily lead to institutional change. Second, colleges must have a culture of evidence that leads them to act on the measureable student outcomes. Substantial improvement requires a continuous process of reform and assessment of evidence of improvement that must become embedded in the college culture. Finally, reform cannot be limited to a small group of students or one segment of the student experience. In summary, comprehensive reform requires three elements: a focus on measurable student success; a culture of evidence; and an intentional and cohesive package of programmatic components.

What is developmental education?

Developmental education. Students' progress is often stalled by lengthy developmental course sequences. All community colleges assess students' academic skills at entry, and based on these assessments, college staff advise the majority of students to enroll in developmental education courses.

What is substantial improvement?

Substantial improvement requires a continuous process of reform and assessment of evidence of improvement that must become embedded in the college culture. Finally, reform cannot be limited to a small group of students or one segment of the student experience.

Do community colleges give you a degree?

However, most students who start in community colleges never complete a degree or certificate. This constitutes a failure for those students to achieve their goals and represents a loss of potential earning power and economic growth and activity for the economy as a whole.

What are the characteristics of learning outcomes?

“Statements that specify what learners will know or be able to do as a result of a learning activity. Outcomes are usually expressed as knowledge, skills or attitudes. In addition, three distinguishing characteristics of learning outcomes are that the specified action of the learner must be observable, measurable, and done by the learner.” (Paradise Valley Community College, www.pvc.maricopa.edu/AI/)

What are the outcomes of student learning?

Student Learning Outcomes include “structured events that occur outside of the classroom, complement the academic programs, and enhance the overall educational experience of students through development of, exposure to, and participation in social, cultural, intellectual, recreational and governance programs by:

What is program assessment?

Program assessment is a systematic, ongoing process that uses the results from measured outcomes to improve programs. Achieving the highest quality level programs, as well as being responsive to the needs of the students requires a well-defined systematic approach to continuous improvement.

What is the purpose of the chapter on UCF assessment?

The purpose of this chapter is to assist you in defining the program’s mission and identifying program goals. Understanding and clearly stating what your program is trying to accomplish serves as a foundation for a successful assessment plan. It is important to define and obtain a consensus on program goals. Although goals are not currently required in UCF’s assessment plan collection system, it is recommended that you develop program goals as a step prior to developing program outcomes. This chapter presents some guidelines that your program can follow to help you do this.

Why do institutions of higher learning conduct assessments?

The desire to know how well the institution and its programs are doing and to improve service and student learning are all motivators for conducting assessment.

What is the purpose of the assessment handbook?

The purpose of this handbook is to provide academic programs with a framework for developing an assessment plan with the objective of improving an academic program. In Chapter 1, an overview of assessment and more specifically program assessment is introduced. Guidelines and suggestions for planning for program assessment are provided in Chapter 2. Methods that can be used to assist the department in developing its mission and program goals statements are included in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 is describes the development of student learning outcomes and includes a checklist and a preparation form to aid those involved in the assessment process. An inventory of program assessment tools, methods and techniques is outlined in Chapter 5. Chapter 6 provides an overview of documenting and using data from assessment.

What is the purpose of Chapter 3 of the Goals Report?

Chapter 3 focuses on providing guidelines for defining goals.

How is assessment important in a course?

Course assessment is important in determining the type and quality of learning occurring in a class. Because assessment is different online, and little literature exists about online assessment practices, this study helps lay a foundation for future studies by providing a description of online assessment and learning and suggesting ways that the two are related. To begin with, the results of this study allow a picture to be drawn of typical assessment practices in online courses at Colorado community colleges. In brief, a typical course would consist of 29 assignments and use five different assessment methods. Assignments would be due in at least 10 of the 15 weeks. The course would likely use seven non-graded assignments but there would be no group activities beyond discussions. The instructor would say the goals of the course require the use of all the learning strategies explored in this study and students would report to use all those strategies with similar emphasis. The instructor would interact with each individual student well over 10 times during the course, responding to comments and questions within 24 to 48 hours. And although the instructor would claim to frequently provide specific and precise feedback to students, he or she would feel that students are using that feedback only about half the time. The instructor would also not be making many changes to the course during the semester.

Why is assessment important in online education?

Perhaps the most promising and understudied aspect of online education is course assessment. Course assessment is important because it has a strong impact on learning and is an indicator of the quality of learning occurring in a class. In the online environment, methods of assessment can be very different. However, the online education literature is currently lacking empirical data about the general status of assessment practices or how those practices relate to student learning. This article lays the groundwork for future studies by providing a description of formative and summative assessment and learning strategies in 60 online courses and suggesting some ways that assessment practices lead to different types of learning. In this study, instructors appear to follow effective practice by using multiple and alternative assessment methods, dispersing grades over time, and providing timely and frequent feedback to students. Students report focusing on relatively more complex learning strategies, such as elaboration and critical thinking over rehearsal. However, online instructors need to ensure that assessments are used strategically and that feedback is productive and able to be acted upon by students.

What is the difference between summative and formative assessment?

Just as learning is a complex process with many variables involved, course assessment is complex and involves many aspects and dimensions. Course assessment is typically theorized in terms of summative and formative assessment. The theoretical difference between the two is a matter of purpose whereby summative assessment is designed to make evaluative judgments of student learning and formative assessment focuses on using feedback and information to improve learning [29]. Assessment scholars agree that most of the literature about summative assessment in higher education focuses on issues of broader accountability rather than the learning that occurs within the classroom [30, 31]. Perhaps the best source of identifying effective summative practice grounded in literature comes from the former American Association for Higher Education (AAHE). In 1992, AAHE pulled its best minds together to create nine well-supported Principles of Good Practice for Assessing Student Learning. Although the AAHE principles also focus on the program and institutional level, they are useful for understanding assessment within the classroom. The principle that is most encompassing and most useful for classroom learning is AAHE principle #2: “Assessment is most effective when it reflects an understanding of learning as multidimensional, integrated, and revealed in performance over time” [32]. Angelo [33] describes this principle in more depth by dividing it into four complementary components: use multiple methods; use multiple assessors; assess over time; and assess multiple dimensions of learning. Each of these four components has its own basis in assessment literature. It is these four aspects of effective practice in summative assessment that form the variables used in this study to describe summative assessment.

What are the learning strategies?

The taxonomy includes five cognitive and metacognitive learning strategies: rehearsal, elaboration, organizational, critical thinking, and metacognitive self-regulation. Each strategy is represented by various study activities or cognitive processes. For example, rehearsal strategies assist the attention and encoding process and include such tasks as memorizing, reciting items from a list, copying material, or underlining passages. In the past, rehearsal strategies were found to be those most frequently used by college students [21]. Although this taxonomy is not based on a continuum, in this study rehearsal strategies are considered the most basic type of learning strategy, representing the surface approaches to learning. The other learning strategies are considered generally more complex learning strategies. Elaboration strategies help students store information into long-term memory by building internal connections and include using imagery, identifying key words, paraphrasing, and creating analogies. Organizational strategies help the learner select appropriate information and construct connections within the information to be learned. Examples are clustering, creating mnemonics, and selecting main ideas such as outlining or diagramming. Critical thinking strategies help students develop new ways of thinking about course content such as applying prior knowledge to new situations, transferring knowledge, reaching decisions, and making evaluations. Finally, metacognitive self-regulation strategies identify how students control and modify their cognitive processes. These planning, regulating, and monitoring strategies include such tasks as setting goals, self-testing, regulating the speed of reading, and using test-taking strategies. These five learning strategies are used in this study to describe the type of learning occurring online and to determine any relationships that exist between assessment practices and learning.

Who is Bridget Arend?

Bridget Arend is Research and Assessment Analyst for the Center for Teaching and Learning and Adjunct Faculty at the University of Denver. She received her PhD in Higher Education and Adult Studies from the University of Denver in 2006. She also teaches and consults in the areas of assessment, learning, and online education. She has 15 years experience in instructional design, research and evaluation, and faculty development in K-12, higher education, and corporate environments and has published and presented about various topics associated with online education.

What are the benefits of community college?

Another benefit is that community college instructors typically have a background in industry , not academia , which is the typical background of instructors at four-year colleges and universities. Community college instructors may be able to offer their students a real-world perspective of the field they are studying.

How long does it take to get a community college degree?

Community colleges mainly award associate degrees and postsecondary certificates. Associate degrees usually take about two years to complete full time. Certificates can take anywhere from a few months to several years to complete.

How old are community colleges?

The population of students tends to be older, too – the average age of a community college student is 28, according to the American Association of Community Colleges.

Do international students go to community colleges?

Yes, international students enroll at community colleges in the U.S. More than 86,000 international students attended community colleges during the 2018-2019 school year, according to data from the Institute of International Education. This represents about 8% of all international student enrollment.

How much is the average college tuition in 2020?

At public, four-year colleges, the average in-state tuition and fees were $10,440 in 2019-2020 and out-of-state tuition and fees were $26,820, according to the College Board's 2019 Trends in College Pricing report.

Is community college good for international students?

Community colleges may be a good fit for international students because they generally have low tuition rates and offer students an easier transition to U.S.-style academics, experts say. The types of services offered at community colleges aim to cater to the specific needs of its local community, D'Amico says.

Do community colleges have open admissions?

Students may have to submit an application, but most community colleges have open admissions policies. This means that students typically do not have to fulfill any academic requirements or compete with others for admission. Almost anyone who applies to a community college with open admissions is accepted.

The Growing Focus on College Completion

See more on er.educause.edu

Barriers to College Completion

The Limitations of Traditional Reform

The Need For Comprehensive Reform

Conclusion