Starting in Fall 2009, EMCC's ECN faculty (adjunct and residential) have developed and implemented the common ECN212 (Microeconomic Principles) final exam. We first started by collaboratively identifiying what we expected all of our students to be able to do as a result of completing our courses, our Learning Objectives (LO) (see attached). We then created multiple choice questions related to each LO (attached), and we all included the questions as part of our independent final exams. Instructors recorded each students' response for each question in an excel spreadsheet and sent to me, who aggregated and analzed the results (See attached). We then each filled out a "Learning Outcomes Improvement Plan" (LOIP), a plan to focus on 3 areas where are students were weakest at and see if we can improve our teaching practices in those areas to improve the scores for next time (see attached for data on the effectiveness of the strategy).
Comments
I love the way you closed the loop with your improvement plan, Erik. Your process identified areas students struggle with across all ECN212 classes as well as ones in which some classes outperform others. This is a great way to discover what's working an institutionalize it, and a very courageous approach.
Erik, you seemed very thorough in your ability to look at the specifics, while also looking at the over-arching components of the course. Most importantly, you were able to identify those "low-hanging fruit" to tackle right away, while acknowledging that others will take more time to adjust. You were able to make adjustments to the time you spend on one topic over another to produce better anticipated outcomes. After reading over your plan, I am eager to take my final presentation and correlate that with how my students fair when aligning their progress to the learning outcomes for my ENG101, 102 and 091 courses!
The assessment and the Excel sheet makes the whole assessment very detailed and interestingly comprehensive assessment. Interpretation and evaluation and shortlist of the learning objectives to strategize the shortcoming is great.
Test