The purpose of the assessment is to establish a sustainable and standardized process that consistently captures meaningful Program Learning Outcome (PLO) data across course sections and semesters. This work directly supports one of our Wildly Important Goals (WIGs) for the 2025–2026 academic year: Create a sustainable, standardized assessment and use Tableau to analyze PLO data to support informed, evidence-based decisions about student success. The specific outcome we want to achieve is a system that ensures data is collected reliably and can be used for ongoing improvement. By using Canvas to streamline assessment delivery and Tableau to analyze the resulting data, we aim to identify trends in student performance, equity gaps, and areas of strength as well as opportunities for instructional improvement. Ultimately, this assessment is designed to support data-informed, evidence-based decision-making that enhances teaching practices and promotes continuous improvement in student success.
The necessity for this assessment stems from the need to establish a more consistent, reliable, and data-driven system for evaluating student learning across Life Sciences courses and semesters. Without a standardized approach, it is difficult to meaningfully track Program Learning Outcomes (PLOs), identify trends in student performance, or make informed instructional improvements that support student success.
Previous iterations of the Life Sciences Assessment have also highlighted several significant barriers that limited its effectiveness. These include timer functionality issues and fingerprint requirements that have persisted across platforms, creating inconsistencies in student experience and data collection. In addition, Google Forms has provided limited data capacity and required time-intensive manual processes to organize and interpret results, reducing efficiency and increasing the potential for error.
Transitioning the assessment into Canvas addresses these challenges in several important ways. Canvas resolves the timer functionality issues and eliminates the need for fingerprint requirements, improving accessibility and consistency. It also allows for more robust and efficient data collection by directly linking Program Learning Outcomes (PLOs) to the assessment, enabling automatic aggregation of results into Tableau. This significantly reduces manual workload while improving the accuracy and usability of the data.
Furthermore, building the assessment as a Canvas quiz ensures consistency across semesters, as it can be easily rolled over between courses and terms with minimal administrative effort. The integration with Tableau also provides centralized data access, eliminating the need to collect results from individual faculty and allowing for verification of student completion.
This system also enhances our ability to track student progression across course sequences such as BIO181-182 and BIO201-202, giving insight into learning development over time. Administering the assessment as both a pre- and post-assessment further strengthens its value by allowing us to measure student growth within a semester and better evaluate the impact of instruction.
In addition, Canvas and Tableau together enable custom reporting across multiple variables, including course section, modality, semester, time of day, and student demographics. This level of analysis supports a deeper understanding of equity gaps and student outcomes across populations.
Ultimately, this assessment aims to provide a sustainable and streamlined solution that improves data quality, reduces administrative burden, and strengthens our ability to make evidence-based decisions that support student success across the division.
Administering the Life Sciences Assessment at both the beginning and end of the semester provides a valuable way to measure student growth over time. Currently, our assessment data does not allow us to distinguish whether improvements are the result of progress within a single semester or across multiple semesters. By implementing pre- and post-assessments in Canvas, we can more accurately determine the impact of instruction on student learning, identify areas where students need additional support, and evaluate the effectiveness of curricular and instructional changes.
The assessment was delivered as a timed Canvas quiz. Students were instructed to complete the PRE-assessment during Weeks 2 and/or 3 of the semester and the POST-assessment during Weeks 14 and/or 15. The students’ individual scores were recorded using a rubric aligned to Life Sciences Program Learning Outcome #8602-PLO1: Students will be able to analyze scientific information using a variety of visual formats. The quizzes were automatically scored, and each instructor manually scored each student's performance using the rubric scoring criteria.
Each assessment includes two manually scored components:
- Overall Score (0–20 points)
- Mastery of the PLO, based on the criteria below:
Mastery Level Criteria
Exceeds Expectations Score > 10
Meets Expectations Score = 10
Below Expectations Score < 10
Does Not Meet Expectations No assessment completed
While students’ individual scores did not affect their overall course grade, extra credit was offered to incentivize participation and encourage completion of the assessment.
Spring 2026 served as the pilot semester for the Life Sciences Assessment 2.0 (LSA 2.0). During this initial implementation, only residential faculty participated in rolling out the assessment across their BIO courses, which included multiple instructional modalities such as face-to-face, hybrid, and online sections. This limited rollout was intentional to ensure that any implementation issues could be identified and addressed early, and that Program Learning Outcome (PLO) alignment and rubric scoring were applied consistently and accurately. However, the long-term goal is to expand participation to include adjunct faculty courses in future semesters to ensure broader implementation across the Life Sciences program.
The pre- and post-assessment results show an increase in average scores from 13.27 to 14.31. This indicates that, on average, students performed better at the end of the instructional period than they did at the beginning. The difference is statistically significant (t(747) = -3.44, p < .001), meaning it is very unlikely that this change is due to random variation alone across the sections included in the dataset.
From an assessment systems perspective, the results also demonstrate that the current Canvas-based data collection process is successfully generating consistent, analyzable Program Learning Outcome (PLO) data at scale. The dataset includes a large sample across multiple course sections, supporting its use for broader program-level analysis.
While this analysis compares group-level averages rather than individual student change, it still provides a stable baseline for identifying trends in student performance over time. These results can be used within Tableau to support ongoing monitoring of student learning outcomes, identify patterns across courses, and inform evidence-based instructional improvements.
Overall, the findings support the goal of establishing a sustainable and standardized assessment process that produces reliable data for continuous improvement and decision-making.
The Life Sciences Assessment 2.0 (LSA 2.0) was developed to establish a sustainable and standardized system for consistently capturing meaningful Program Learning Outcome (PLO) data across course sections and semesters, directly supporting a 2025–2026 Wildly Important Goal to use Tableau for data analysis and evidence-based decision-making to improve student success. This updated system addresses limitations of previous iterations, including technical issues, restricted data capacity, and labor-intensive manual processing, by transitioning the assessment into Canvas for improved reliability, accessibility, and alignment with PLOs. The Canvas-based design enables automated data aggregation into Tableau, streamlined reporting, and enhanced analysis of student performance, equity gaps, and progression across course sequences. Implemented as pre- and post-assessments in a timed Canvas quiz format, LSA 2.0 uses a rubric aligned to PLO #8602-PLO1 and provides extra credit to encourage participation. Pilot implementation in Spring 2026 with residential faculty across multiple modalities allowed for refinement of the system, with future expansion planned to include adjunct faculty for broader program-wide adoption.