January 8, 2003

Our Paradise Valley Community College Mathematics Department assessment plan has evolved into a 4-faceted approach.

1.      We have compiled a database that goes back to the fall of 1996. Every section of every class we have offered is entered. The data includes instructor name and status (adjunct or full-time), delivery method (Academic Systems, Flex Express, etc), number of students enrolled, number of students dropped or withdrawn, number of students with grades of A, B, C and D or F. Each semester from now on, we will enter the same data so that we can produce reports of a purely statistical nature regarding completion rates, etc.

2.      We are assessing cohorts of student through the use of focus groups of faculty members teaching specified courses. To date, these efforts have consisted primarily of

       choosing a few course competencies,

       designing multiple choice questions over them,

       embedding the questions in semester final exams,

       compiling the percentage of correct responses,

       identifying which, if any, of the competencies we need to try to improve on,

       giving instructors free rein to choose their own methods of improving success on the chosen competencies (in one case faculty devised a project to use as both a teaching and assessment instrument)

       re-testing the competencies the following semester and comparing results,

       meeting to discuss the methods that produced the best results, and

       repeating the process.

3.      We are also assessing mathematical learning outcomes that are more generic in nature. That is, they transcend individual course boundaries. For example, "Describe a trend indicated in a chart or graph and make predictions based on that trend." Clearly, this learning outcome is as applicable to an Introductory Algebra student as to a Calculus student. Our method of assessing these learning outcomes has been to provide instructors with a scoring rubric which contains the outcomes and ask them to assign a project, test, or other means of their choosing to check their students' progress. Some focus groups have chosen to write just one such instrument for all the sections of that class. Samples of student work are then randomly chosen from each section, copied and returned to the instructor. The randomly chosen samples are "sanitized" (names, class, etc. removed) and the entire collection is available for review by the Student Academic Achievement Assessment Committee as part of the campus-wide assessment plan.

4.      The fourth segment of our plan is a student questionnaire designed to gauge their level of satisfaction with class times, instructional formats, etc. This questionnaire is now in the pilot stage.

I hope this gives everyone an overview of the current state of our assessment plan. Producing such a plan is and has been one of our major departmental goals. We still have considerable fine-tuning that must be done before we have a mature, effective assessment plan.