CLIC Assessment Mini-Workshop: From Nashville to St. Paul

On Friday, January 18, 2013, CLIC offered an Assessment Mini-Workshop, From Nashville to St. Paul: Update from the 2012 ACRL Immersion Assessment Track Conference, presented by Andrea Hudson Koeppe, University of St. Thomas, and Ginny Moran Heinrich, Macalester College.

Addressing Challenges and Concerns. Instead of traditional name tags, attendees used a buttonmaker to create customized name badges with words and pictures symbolizing their feelings about assessment.  Attendees wrote their concerns about assessment on tags and tied their tags on plastic farm animals which were then “corralled” for the rest of the workshop.

Starting on a Common Ground. Andrea and Ginny began by laying the groundwork of the philosophy and vocabulary of assessment, with an emphasis on the need to measure outcomes, not outputs. Attendees practiced writing and critiquing sample Student Learning Outcome Statements, using Bloom’s Taxonomy Verbs.

Framing Leadership to Address Assessment Concerns. For the final exercise, attendees took the Bolman-Deal Leadership Orientation test and were sorted into four groups: Structural, Human Resource, Political, or Symbolic.  Each group was asked to come up with solutions to a specific Assessment Challenge.

After the first round, members from each group’s opposite (Structural-Symbolic or Human Resource-Political) were brought in to lend their perspectives to crafting a solution.  The photos below show the four Assessment Challenges with the groups’ solutions.

Upcoming Assessment Workshops. The next CLIC Assessment Mini-Workshop will be held on April 3, 2013, 1pm-4pm, at Concordia University, LTC 213.  For further information on upcoming Assessment workshops and conference, see our Assessment Task Force web page.

For further photographs from the January 18 program, please visit CLIC's Facebook page.