Three (3) 90-Minute Recordings of Audio Online Seminars • Originally Broadcast November 25, December 4, and December 11, 2008 • $425

Purchase this three-part online seminar series on student assessment:

Getting Started With Student Learning Assessment: 2008
Choosing a Published Instrument to Assess Student Learning: 2008
Developing Tools and Strategies to Assess Student Learning: 2008

Someone once offered this definition of student learning assessment: “It’s deciding what we want our students to learn and making sure they learn it.”

What could be simpler? But spend a few hours pondering the subject, and you’re left with a different question: Could this be any more complicated?

When it comes to assessment, there are enough perspectives, enough stakeholders, and enough tools and methodologies to make your head spin.

If you’d like some help making sense of it all, purchase this unique, three-part online seminar series led by Linda Suskie of the Middle States Commission on Higher Education. She leads you through a careful examination of student assessment and the tools you can use to perform it. Whether you’re a new faculty member looking to incorporate assessment into your classes, or an experienced member of a departmental or institutional assessment team, you’ll gain valuable insight and a better understanding of the sometimes complex means to achieve assessment’s simple, but very worthwhile goals.

Seminar #1:
Getting Started With Student Learning Assessment

In this presentation, you’ll gain a solid understanding of the key issues surrounding assessment, including:
• What assessment is.
• The role of assessment in the teaching/learning process.
• How to articulate learning outcomes.
• How to review curricula for alignment with expected outcomes.
• How to identify and implement teaching strategies to help achieve outcomes.
• The audience for assessment results and reporting.

You’ll also get a straightforward examination of the strengths and weaknesses of a wide range of assessment methods, including the:
• Internal standards-based perspective
• External standards-based perspective
• Peer-referenced perspective
• Best-practice perspective
• Value-added perspective
• Longitudinal perspective
• Strengths and weaknesses perspective
• Capability perspective
• Productivity perspective

Seminar #2
Choosing a Published Instrument to Assess Student Learning

This seminar will help you decide whether published instruments should be part of your assessment program, and if so, which ones. You’ll learn:
• The difference between a published and standardized test.
• The relative advantages and disadvantages of published and locally-developed assessment tools.
• How to obtain information on published instruments, and how to interpret and critically analyze that information.
• The key questions that must be addressed as you plan the administration of a published instrument.
• The appropriate role of published instruments in your assessment program.

Ms. Suskie will also review in detail a number of well-known (and lesser-known) published instruments, including:
• MAPP
• CAAP
• CBASE
• Praxis 1
• Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA)
• The National Survey of Student Engagement
• GRE
• And more

Seminar #3
Developing Tools and Strategies to Assess Student Learning

Locally-developed assessment tools provide an alternative – or in some cases, a supplement – to published instruments. In this fast-paced session, you’ll learn about developing your own assessment tools. You’ll gain insight into:
• The role of assessment in the teaching/learning process.
• The four key characteristics of effective assessment tools and strategies.
• The difference between “direct” and “indirect” evidence of student learning.
• The assessment information that may already be available at your institution.
• Which tools return the most information in proportion to the time spent developing and using them.
• How to develop rubrics, in more than one format, to evaluate student work.
• How to create multiple-choice tests that assess more than basic understanding.
• How to use reflective writing to assess the “ineffable” goals: attitudes, values, and the like.
• How to write effective “prompts” for essays and other assignments.

Exceptional value … and a campus-wide training opportunity!
You can buy all three seminar CDs for the low price of just $425. And because that fee is per site, not per person, you can invite others from your campus to watch them at no extra charge. Just project the programs in a lecture hall or meeting facility, and invite your colleagues to join in!

Watch them one at a time in separate training sessions, or schedule a half-day meeting and watch them in succession - whatever is most convenient for your staff. But make sure to include extra time for discussion afterward to determine how to best implement these strategies at your institution.

Featured Higher Education Presenter:

        Linda Suskie

Available in CD or print transcript format. These CDs contain audio presentations with PowerPoint and can be viewed on any standard personal computer equipped with Windows Media Player. Our CDs are not compatible with Macintosh computer systems. Presenter's handouts are included as a PDF on CDs and in hard copy with transcript purchases.

Three (3) 90-Minute Recordings of Audio Online Seminars • Originally Broadcast November 25, December 4, and December 11, 2008 • $425