OA at Hofstra Welcome to the Assessment Newsletter In this monthly newsletter we will share the latest news about Outcomes Assessment at Hofstra, as well as the triumphs and challenges of outcomes assessment!
Coming soon! The new and improved OA website. Easier to find, with lots of useful information and tools for assessment.
Did you know... that HCLAS has a multidisciplinary team working across departments to assess General Education goals ? The General Education Outcomes Assessment Committee consists of several faculty and administrators. Its mission is to lead the faculty in developing and implementing assessment of GenEd requirements. The Committee has worked with the departments of the College to map GenEd goals and outcomes to all distribution courses. They found that nearly all goals and outcomes mapped robustly to existing distribution courses, offering strong evidence that students would have multiple opportunities to develop requisite competencies during the distribution sequence.
Fact or Fiction? Surveys should never be used for outcome assessment. Surveys are self reports about attitudes, opinions, behaviors and experiences. Although they are not direct measures of learning, surveys are commonly used in assessment because sometimes they are the only way to obtain important information, like student satisfaction, post graduate outcomes, or evaluations of internship placements, to name a few common examples. The Answer: Fiction. Student, faculty and alumni surveys can be useful tools for outcomes assessment, and a great source of data to augment the direct assessment of student learning. (To learn more about the use and development of surveys, please email Terri Shapiro at terri.shapiro@Hofstra.edu)
Q&A: Your questions about assessment Email your assessment questions to Barbara Bohannon barbara.j.bohannon@Hofstra.edu or Terri Shapiro at terri.shapiro@Hofstra.edu and we will feature one in each newsletter.