I Imagine All of Us, As We Go Through the School Semester Or Year, Come Across Problems

Course-Embedded Assessment

Charles Nelson

Kean University, ,

Course-embedded assessment refers to program- or institution-wide formative assessment embedded in courses to focus attention on student learning and to facilitate student awareness of the assessment process.

Guidelines (from Farmer, 1999)

• Understand curriculum as a plan of learning, not merely a collection of courses.
• Provide sequential and cumulative learning.
• Encourage transferable learning across the curriculum.
• Design the curriculum as a matrix by integrating skill development into subject matter courses.
• Implement student-centered teaching strategies to foster active rather than passive learning.
• Develop qualitative, performance-based course-embedded assessment strategies both to assess student learning and to increase student learning.
• Define mastery learning as the ability to apply prior learning to a new stimulus.

Kean University’s student outcome objectives for composition across courses

The student will demonstrate

• critical and creative thinking skills (including cognition, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation) in producing unified, coherent papers.
• the ability to vary rhetorical strategies in conjunction with varying purposes, audiences, and content.
• the ability to incorporate source material into writing.
• the ability to structure essays coherently.
• knowledge and understanding of standard English usage with respect to grammar, punctuation, and spelling.

Application in Kean University’s ESL Program

Placement, mid-term, and final in-class (exam) essays for each course using a holistic rubric.

Instructor of record assesses placement and mid-term essays, while 2 other instructors assess the final exam.

Application in class with writing evaluation rubric

Writing assessment criteria (Huot):

site-based, locally controlled, context sensitive, rhetorically based, and accessible

Conclusion

Course-embedded assessment is common sense, and it can enable an institution to move from having a fragmented hodge-podge of courses focused on delivering instruction to having an integrated, coherent framework centering on student learning—thus helping students to overcome the compartmentalization and fragmentation of writing (and other) knowledge that occurs when skills are not transferred across years and courses.

References

Best, Linda, & Lees, Bryan. (2000). A Vision for Skill Development: The New General Education Program at Kean University. Research and Teaching in Developmental Education 16, 119-122.

Farmer, Donald W. (1999). Course-Embedded Assessment: A Catalyst for Realizing the Paradigm Shift from Teaching to Learning. Journal of Staff, Program & Organizational Development16, 199-211.

———. (1999). Institutional Improvement and Faculty Motivation: A Case Study. New Directions for Teaching and Learning78, 87-95.

Huot, Brian. (2002). (Re-)articulating writing assessment for teaching and learning. Logan: Utah State University Press.

Manton, Edgar J., & English, Donald E. (2002). The College of Busines and Technology's course embedded student outcomes assessment process. College Student Journal 36, 261-269.

O'Brien, Jean, and Edmund Napieralski. (Winter 2003). Greater Expectations: The Story of Institutional Transformation at King's College. Liberal Education89 (1), 38-41.

Swisher, Judith D., and Samuel B. Green. (1998). An Empirical Study Comparing Curriculum-Embedded Assessment and Traditional Aptitude Measures for Predicting Job-Related Outcomes for Students with Disabilities. Educational Assessment5 (1), 57-70.

Weigle, Sarah Cushing. (2002). Assessing Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.