Students and Assessment and Evaluation

The National Survey of Student Engagement — an annual report providing comparative data on student experiences at four-year institutions nationwide — is entering its 10th year. Now that the survey is reaching what some consider a critical mass of participants, this year’s report finds that variations in educational quality are more prevalent within institutions than among them. As a result, NSSE officials argue that holistic assessments, such as theirs, provide a more accurate comparison than do those using institution-wide averages.

Cosponsored by the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU), EDUCAUSE, and the University of Central Florida (UCF), the Students, Technology and Learning: Strategies for Success Conference (formerly the Key to Competitiveness) provides AASCU institutions with an opportunity to learn more about the next generation of students—a group with much greater expectations for the use of technology in higher education than previous generations. The event allows teams of presidents and senior institutional leaders to explore new ways of using technology to meet student expectations and more effectively serve the next generation learner.

Surveying the university community taught us about the importance of the process as well as the survey results.

The first decade of the 21st century is already on the wane and we stand at an interesting point as regards the use of technology to support and enhance learning and teaching. The fact that we still refer to much of this enhancement as e-learning (and still disagree about what the term actually means) signals that the relationship between technology and learning is not as yet an entirely comfortable one. e-Learning still carries with it a sense of something 'other' and few institutions can say that a sound understanding of available technologies, their capabilities and current examples of appropriate usage, forms a cornerstone of the curriculum design process.

Within the academic community there remains a sizable proportion of sceptics who question the value of some of the tools and approaches and perhaps an even greater proportion who are unaware of the full range of technological enhancements in current use. Amongst senior managers there is a concern that it is often difficult to quantify the returns achieved on the investment in such technologies.

On the other hand those in the vanguard of technical developments are already signalling the 'Death of the VLE' (Stiles 2007) and heralding a new set of approaches based on a different pedagogic outlook and on the underlying technologies and social and collaborative tools that are collectively labelled the Web 2.0 phenomenon.

The Open Source Portfolio (OSP), which began as a student-centered tool promoting student learning and providing opportunities for career development and reflection, also offers features that make it an essential tool for value-added assessment, program improvement, and accreditation. This session will offer perspectives from several campuses concerning these OSP applications.

This session will discuss the methods and preliminary results of the first and second steps of a three-step process for assessing a survey's validity. The survey of interest was designed to expand on McVay (2000, 2001) and Bernard et al. (2004), as well as examine learner characteristics and technology capabilities of online students.

Routine in business, data mining has unrealized potential in education. Sophisticated educational media enable the collection of rich data streams about individual learners. Analyzing these data streams could yield formative, diagnostic information about student performance (including real-time feedback to teachers) and research findings about student behavior and learning. Session presenters will share their work exploring the educational potentials of data mining.

"With federal backing, 3 higher ed groups will undertake project to develop multiple ways of measuring student learning — answering call for accountability, but with colleges in the driver’s seat."

A student peer-feedback tool enhances the educational quality of assignments without overburdening faculty or adding administrative costs.

"As Congress and the U.S. Education Department contemplate whether and how to force colleges to publish significantly more information about their performance, two associations of public universities are forging ahead with their own plan for a voluntary accountability system under which institutions would release data about student learning outcomes that most of them have not typically made public. And the major association of private colleges on Monday offered a look at its own accountability template, which would give institutions much more leeway about what they report about their students’ classroom success. "