Winter 2025 Assessment Brunch

The Winter Assessment Workshop & Brunch will be held:

5th week Thursday,

February 6, 2025

11:30-12:30

in the Hicks Student Center Banquet Hall.

Please RSVP at this link

This year, your friends on the Assessment Committee have been working to analyze, understand, celebrate, and share the student learning that happens collectively in the First Year Seminar and First Year Forum programs at K.  We have carefully read syllabi, analyzed student data, and synthesized feedback.    

At our current stage of this assessment work, we propose a collection of First Year Seminar student outcome areas that we believe are shared broadly.

The First Year Seminar Program — the individual FYS classes themselves along with the Beyond Google experience and the First Year Forums — advances students toward these outcomes:

  1. Building Community
  2. Gaining Research Skills
  3. Engaging with Academic and Co-Curricular Life at K
  4. Gaining Metacognitive Skills
  5. Gaining Communication Skills — Reading+Writing, Speaking+Listening
  6. Demonstrating Knowledge of a Topic

At our winter brunch we’ll briefly present these Learning Outcome Areas in greater detail and share some supporting data.

Participants will work together to identify how their own work (in FYS, FYF or Beyond Google) advances these outcomes.

This is a long list of outcomes to fit into a short time in the first-year fall term.   There is too much there to rest solely on an individual instructor or FYF presenter. We can only advance these learning outcomes through coordination and collaboration. With that in mind we will also be asking for your feedback about the kinds of institutional support that would make that workable for you.

Please consider attending if you:

  • Teach a First Year Seminar
  • Are involved with First Year Experience
  • Present a First Year Forum
  • Work with first-year advisees
  • Plan activities for first-year students
  • Are involved in any aspect of the Shared Passages Seminar Program
  • Are involved with assessment in your department or unit

Winter 2025Assessment Brunch – Outcomes

  1. Each participant will identify their own work with FY students in the proposed FYS student outcome areas
  2. Participants will work together, drawing from their own expertise and experience, to identify the kinds of institutional support needed to advance these FYS learning outcomes.

Winter 2023 Assessment Brunch

Dear Faculty & Staff Colleagues, 

Please join us at the Winter Assessment Workshop on Wednesday, January 25, 2023.  

The workshop will be held during common time (10:55 – 11:55 a.m.) in the Hicks Student Center Banquet Hall.  

Every day in our work at the College, all of us observe students, form perceptions about what we see, and then act on those perceptions to make decisions about our work and programs. As an assessment community at K, we want to understand and systematize this work to make even more effective decisions and to gain important perspectives that allow us to tell the story of our successes even more clearly. 

We plan for an interactive session that will provide hands-on experience putting assessment into action with YOUR real-life examples. Please consider bringing an example of something you are already working on, such as: 

  • existing syllabus  
  • assessment plan 
  • any program, process or project  in your unit that impacts students

Don’t have a project currently in mind? We will share some examples of what your colleagues are doing in both curricular and co-curricular settings. 

We think this workshop will be an especially helpful and time-efficient way for department chairs and others responsible for unit-level assessment to leverage the power of the campus-wide assessment community. 

A few more important details: 

  1. Brunch Buffet will be available at the workshop, and participants are invited to attend as much or as little of the hour as their schedule allows. 
  1. To help with planning, please RSVP for the Workshop by 4:00 p.m. Monday, January 23. 
  1. Visit the Institutional Assessment webpage to read more about the work of the Assessment Academy and preview the ILO rubrics

Assessment Brunch – Learning Outcomes

Finally, assessment begins with stating goals and desired outcomes:

  1. Participants will be able to understand, based on the presented examples, how assessment rubrics can be applied in practice.
  2. Participants will be able to adapt one of the College’s ILO rubrics to a program, project or process in their unit/area and have a more practical foundation from which to provide feedback on how the current rubrics work.
  3. Participants will use the language and developmental stages of assessment rubrics either with their own example or by contributing to a colleague’s example, to better understand how a program, project, or process contributes to a student learning outcome specific to their unit/area.