What do we want to know about our students?

So, we are going to assess our students. There's a lot happening in our programs.  We can collect lots and lots of data.  How much data do we need? It takes time to design an assessment plan.  It takes time to assess and more time to produce and analyze the reports.  What is the best approach to this complicated task?

What do we really want to know about students?  There are basically three things that we want to know...Are our graduates qualified for the certification we have given them? Did they learn what they know and can do from OUR instructional programs? Is our instruction effective for ALL students?

Let's look at the first question: Are our graduates qualified ...?  What data do we need and which report do we produce to find this out?

This question is asking about a frequency distribution: a bar chart is the most common report of this type.  Once we have produced a bar chart, we will be able to see whether or not our graduates are all scoring at or above the acceptable level.  We can produce multiple bar charts for each standard in our learning domains, or we can produce one bar chart with the overall average for all our students, for one or more groups, departments, or programs. That means we can say with confidence that our graduates are qualified.

Did they learn what they know and can do from OUR instructional programs?
...or did they arrive on campus already knowing what they know and with the same skills and abilities as they have now?  In order to answer this question, we need to know what our students know and can do BEFORE they start the program. Then we need to be able to compare where they start with where they are at graduation (or any other point in time)...and we need to be able to intepret the difference in these two scores.  Is it likely that our instruction influenced these scores so that the student progressed in their understanding because of our instruction?  Or, was this learning progression just a natural by-product of time passing and the maturing process?  In other words, was the change significant enough that we could pat ourselves on the back...or do we need to go back to the drawing board?

(Answering this question is a little more complicated than producing bar charts...but doable, if we plan ahead.)

Is our instruction effective for ALL students?

...because if it isn't, we're not being FAIR to those students who are not learning the skills that they need for the future.  As educators, we know that all students can learn, but that each learner has their own timeline for learning and their own learning preferences.  Learners engages with new ideas in different ways and they understand new ideas using different processes and strategies.  So, just for starters, there are at least three categories of learner that we need to examine to make sure that we are facilitating learning for each of these groups: How do our students engage with new ideas? How do our students understand new ideas? How do we accomodate various timelines?

(More questions!  Oh, boy...this is getting more complicated...!!)