Recent News

Assessment Project in English Department Prompts Creation of New Evaluation Report

    The Bachelor of English program recently undertook a program assessment of their Critical Reading and Writing Well outcomes using the Bb Outcomes system. Led by Dr. Matthew Giancarlo, the project sought to assess a sample of student work from ENG 230. The program used a department generated holistic rubric to assess 25 students’ assignments in a double-blind evaluation. Results of this evaluation will be recorded in the program’s 2011-2012 Annual Improvement Action Plan.

    In order to better assist the English Department, Dan Cleland, the Office of Assessment’s IT Support Specialist, created a new report that would easily provide the department with the mean, median, mode and standard deviation of each evaluation set. The report also made it very easy for the department to determine the evaluators’ inter-rater reliability. Because the Office of Assessment feels like this report will be useful to all programs that choose to use the Bb Outcomes artifact evaluation system, it has been made available system-wide. Now, any program that chooses to use Bb Outcomes to assess their student work will easily be able to generate simple statistics needed to analyze the results of the evaluation.

Simpson Presents in China

    Leah Simpson, Assessment Specialist in the Office of Assessment, attended the eLearning Forum Asia 2012 conference in Beijing, China on April 23-26 where she was the special guest of BeeNet, a Blackboard subsidiary.  While at the conference, Simpson presented a keynote speech addressing the process the University of Kentucky uses to assess its UK Core program.  Unlike many other institutions, UK has chosen to assess the UK Core program-wide which means that thousands of student assignments are collected annually.  In order to expedite this process the University uses Bb Outcomes to collect, sample, and distribute student work to faculty evaluators. 

    Currently, UK is the only Bb Outcomes client that uses the system to assess at such a large scale.  Other users primarily assess at the degree program level.  For this reason, the University has gained notoriety for taking on such a large assessment project.  Simpson shared the benefits and hardships of assessing in this way, but concluded that this process could not be completed using a traditional pen and paper evaluation process.

    While in China, Simpson was able to take in a few tourist attractions.  Braving the rain, she set out to see the Great Wall of China, the Ming Tombs, Tiananmen Square, and the Olympic Village.

Composition and Communication Large-Scale Assessment Project

    Drs. Amy Gaffney and Jason Helms have begun their efforts to organize a large-scale assessment of student work from the C&C I and C&C II courses. Both courses work together to make up Outcome #2 in the UK Core program. Outcome #2 is jointly taught by faculty and lecturers from the Colleges of Arts & Sciences and Communication & Information Studies.

    Drs. Gaffney and Helms seek more detailed information about student performances in these courses and are prepared to evaluate work from 400 students in order to analyze the progress made from entry to exit in the outcome. Using a skill-based rubric written by a group of faculty associated with the courses, the researchers will seek to find the strengths and weaknesses of the student performance in the classes. Dr. Gaffney explained that this research will not only be used to make improvements in the program but she has also received permission to publish her research and assessment processes.

    Large-scale assessment, such as this, is difficult to manage. A similar assessment was completed last summer but the process was cumbersome and time intensive. Using the Bb Outcomes system to gather student work and package it in such a way so that rubric results could be easily gathered will save Drs. Gaffney and Helm and their assistants from many hours of tedious work.

Customizing Projects in the Bb Outcomes System

Prompted by a desire to automate the gathering of certain accreditation-required documents, the College of Nursing contacted the Office of Assessment for information about customizing reporting processes in the Bb Outcomes system. The first project was the creation of a committee functions report.

The College of Nursing requires each of the college’s committee chairs to complete a yearly report that links the committees’ goals or functions to the activities and decisions made by the committee. The Dean’s reports as well as the reports of the Associate Deans are also done using this format. This also links to the College of Nursing Strategic Plan. With the assistance of the Office of Assessment, the report was loaded into the Bb Outcomes system. In June of 2011, Leah Simpson led a variety of trainings on how to use the system. Many of the faculty and administrators were able to complete their committees’ information the day of the training. Reports were created in the system, and the College is now able to run an independent committee report, or a college-wide report.

This is just the first of the customization projects that the College of Nursing is working on. The Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) program has requested assistance creating a course evaluation process using Bb Outcomes. The Office of Assessment hopes to have this functioning within the next few months.

UK Libraries Uses Bb Outcomes Artifact Templates to Assess Student Work

Like all other faculty, UK librarians wanted to assess the students’ work that they assigned. Unlike other faculty, the librarians do not teach their own courses for credit but instead, faculty across campus regularly invite UK Library faculty to visit their classes and teach a lesson on information literacy. The Library faculty then assign an  information literacy task to the students and ask the students to complete the assignment and turn it in. Previously this process has been accomplished using Google Docs, but it was a rather involved process for both students and faculty to complete. When the Library’s faculty learned about Bb Outcomes, they asked if this technology might be able to help them assign and collect evidence from the students that they teach. After consulting with the staff in the Office of Assessment, it was decided that UK Libraries should use the Artifact Template feature for their assessment process.

Prior to visiting a class, Library faculty build an artifact template for the students to complete. Artifact templates are very similar to assignments, but where assignments are housed on the Learn side of Bb, artifact templates are housed on the Outcomes side. The template is linked to the students in the course or section that is being  addressed. Each student then receives an email with a unique link that asks them to complete the assignment. Students submit the assignment in the exact same way that they would submit an assignment inside a Bb classroom. The results of the assignment are then sent back to the UK Libraries Outcomes page where they can be evaluated using one of the four rubrics that the Library has entered into Bb Outcomes. Results of the evaluation are then easily accessed by running a report from the artifact template’s home page.

Students and Library faculty both benefit from doing assessment in this way. The students benefit because they are not required to find the appropriate place to submit their assignment. The link is sent to them automatically via their UK email address. They also benefit because they receive immediate feedback from the Library faculty once their assignment has been evaluated. There is no need for faculty to link the assignment to a student’s email and type out their response; it can be done automatically through the system. Faculty benefit because this process automates a lot of the steps that they were forced to do manually in the past. In addition, they don’t have to spend long hours preparing graphs and tabulating the results, as the Bb Outcomes system does that automatically for them.