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Course Level Assessment

The Office of Assessment supports all Course-level assessment needs.  Course-level assessment is the level with which most faculty members are familiar.  This level includes the activities associated with teaching, learning, and curriculum development.

Some of the services we offer include rubric development, course and curriculum mapping, assignment design, objective & outcome mapping, and objective and outcome development.

Benefits of Course-level Assessment

  • It improves student learning.
  • It ensures that activities in the classroom align with course objectives and program outcomes.
  • It provides feedback to improve teaching methodologies.
  • If properly aligned, it can feed program-level assessment efforts.

Student Evaluations of Teaching (SETs)

Student Evaluations of Teaching, or SETs, are the course evaluations administered toward the end of each course taught at UCA.  The SET system currently used by UCA is SmartEvals.  There is a standard question set that all students receive, which can be supplemented by departments and instructors, as needed.  Each student receives a notification via email when their evaluations open.  Blackboard, UCA’s Learning Management System (LMS), will also block a student’s access to their courses until the evaluations are complete.  The Office of Assessment compiles and reports on the evaluation findings.

Confidence Levels – It is important that response rates for SETs are high in order to establish a confidence level where the results can be generalizable to the overall course and greater population.

Examples:

The standard levels are the 80% confidence and the 95% confidence. 95% is usually used for hypothesis testing while 80% is more appropriate for exploratory analysis, such as evaluations.

The goal at UCA is to achieve 95% confidence.

A class of 10 requires 7 responses or 75% response rate for an 80% confidence and 100% response rate for 95% confidence.
A class of 20 requires 58% response rate for 80% confidence and 97% response rate for 95% confidence.
A class of 30 requires 48% response rate for 80% confidence and 96% response rate for 95% confidence.
A class of 50 requires 35% response rate for 80% confidence and 93% response rate for 95% confidence.

Resources

Course-Based Review and Assessment: Methods for Understanding Student Learning – Includes worksheets to help simplify your course assessment development process.

Teaching Goals Inventory – Complete the inventory about a single class to generate a report that helps you focus the outcomes of your course.

National Teaching and Learning Forum –  Discover what teaching and learning practices peers across the U.S. are using to advance and measure student learning in the classroom.

Examples