Taking Initiative in the Age of Assessment

Abstract

Assessment is an increasingly important part of communication pedagogy, not just for periodic accreditation reviews but for ongoing justifications for resources and course design. This project relates the story of how another college at our university prompted us to prove that our Science Writing and Presentation course really delivered what it was supposed to deliver. Our resulting assessment allowed us to maintain control over the course and how it would be measured, along with providing us with data we are leveraging to demonstrate student learning outcomes while maintaining and even extending the impact of our course and attracting increased instructional resources.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Lisa Hanasono, John Dowd, and Rob Yale for their assistance in coding and organizing data.

Notes

[1] Rates of attrition for participation in the study were high. This can be attributed to a couple of factors. First, some of the measures (Information Literacy and PRCA) were taken by students outside of class, and several students did not complete both measures at time 1 and time 2. Second, due to camera malfunction, videos of some presentations at time 2 were lost. Third, variability in regular attendance contributed toward the attrition on the writing assessment. There is very little attrition in general across all sections of the course, as it is a requirement for graduation, but our study design did not allow students to make up any of the measures, either pre or post, if they happened to miss one of the days we were collecting data. The attrition in the study, then, does not accurately reflect the low level of attrition in the course overall.