5 The Projects: Assessment
Assessment in Higher Education is a complicated term. For faculty it most often and immediately means how do you determine what grade to assign. More conceptually, however, assessment refers to the process of measuring whether learning goals or objectives are being achieved. Besides for grading this information is valuable for continually working on a course design. The course template for this semester was modified from past versions based on assessment, including feedback from faculty and student results.
Assessment in LEH 250
In the course template, three standard projects are outlined. One is to assess college success skills. The others assess disciplinary learning. All of them assess essential academic skills. The projects are:
- College success plan. (Midterm project)
- Disciplinary content: Annotated bibliography
- Disciplinary content: Deep dive project including presentation.
Midterm Projet
The midterm project in LEH250 allows you to assess what your students know about Lehman College and how they approach the transition to college. No matter what format you use for this project, it should allow your students to interact with the materials in the college success portion of the course and apply them to their own experiences.
The project should include elements from most of the chapters and activities in the course. Students often enjoy the chance to be creative in this project. Given that most students are taking a composition/writing course, we recommend that you avoid formal writing (e.g., essays) in this project. Students should work directly from the material given in the course and use it to create their own creative first-year success project.
Examples of projects:
- A “welcome to college video” for new students
- A handbook or guide for new students
- A play called “Life at Lehman”
- A series of letters to be opened when (ie: open this letter when you are feeling overwhelmed)
Preparation/prework
Before starting the project
- Ask your students to identify the FORM and the CONTENT for their project
- For form, they should describe what they plan on creating
- For content, have them identify what chapters and specific information they are using, plus a quick description of their own experience that they will add
Have students turn this in (an idea is to have them discuss this in small groups or use a discussion board to share so they learn from each other)
Final Projects (Deep Dive )
The final project in LEH250 is called the “Deep Dive” project. This project asks students to become the class’s SME (subject matter expert). As SME, they are expected to identify the area they are looking into, create a focusing (or overarching or guiding) question, develop a set of keywords and a search strategy, and then find readings supporting their deep dive into the topic. In some disciplines, this might be called research. For LEH250 we use the term deep dive as it is more fitting for the work that we are asking the students to do.
The information gathered from the deep dive is documented in an annotated bibliography and then synthesized. This synthesis supports a presentation that they create and record.
Steps in the Deep Dive
- Identify a topic of interest and learn about it
- Write a focusing/overarching/guiding question
- Determine a search strategy and keywords
- Locate readings and resources
- Review each resource and take notes on it
- Project 1: Create an annotated bibliography for the resources
- Project 2: Create and record a presentation
Examples of Deep Dive projects
In a class that read about procrastination as their class theme (using Eat That Frog by Brian Tracy):
- How does procrastination affect happiness and what should students know about this?
- How does music affect procrastination, and how can college students use this knowledge?
In a class that read about many articles on physical health and wellness:
- How does exercise affect metabolism, energy, and eating and how does this apply to adolescents?
- How does exercise affect concentration and focus, and how can this be useful to college students?
In a class that read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
- How does the past research affect the current requirements for working with human subjects?
- What processes and procedures exist to protect human subjects, and what do undergraduate college students need to know?
- What processes and procedures are used when approving medications and treatments, and what should adults know about them?
The Deep Dive guide
The Deep Dive Guide is a booklet that walks students through the deep-dive process step by step. It is not a replacement for instruction but provides students with notes that they can refer to after class. This is especially important as much of the deep-dive process will be done individually, and the guide can be reread as needed.
You can find the whole book here
What sources should students use?
In the deep dive project, students should use:
- 4 general web sources
- 2 or 3 reference materials (encyclopedia entries from the Lehman Library or web sources)
- 2 news sources
- 1 scholarly sources (journal articles from the Lehman Library)
- 1 trade or professional source
You can modify this based on your class and topics but please use at least 10 sources.
The numbers above are suggestions; you may decide to change these based on your class needs and focus topic. For example, for some topics, it may make more sense to have more news sources and less of a different type of source.
The library is available to support students in searching and identifying resources for their deep dive.
You may want to setup a meeting with the library to work with your students on library searching, keyword strategies, and other related topics.
✓A note from Bridget: I have my students use Gale Ebooks for the library-based encylopedia articles as it is a good, general reference database. I have my students use One Search or Academic Search Complete for the journal article.
About the annotated bibliography
An annotated bibliography is a bibliography (list of sources) with additional notes. For the deep-dive project, the annotated bibliography allows you to see the article they are using and their process for choosing it.
An annotated bibliography has the following areas:
| Citation entry (we recommend APA style)
Summary paragraph that discusses the type of source and it what it contains.. Evaluation and connection paragraph that discusses details from the source and how it connects to the deep drive project. |
There are many resources online that can be helpful; see the Deep Dive Guide for suggestions.
The tutoring center is available to support students if they need assistance in creating their annotated bibliography.
About the recorded presentation
The recorded presentation records the student’s understanding and synthesis of information in the deep dive. Since the course does not have time for 24 (or more) students to present live, having the students record their presentations gives you a chance to review each one and have students share with each other.
The presentation must feature the student’s voice and visuals that keep the audience’s attention. We prefer to have the student’s image as well. Many students choose to build a slide deck for this purpose; however, some students have had more creative ideas and recorded themselves conducting discussions, walking around, or showing video clips and images with music. As the instructor, you can determine what would be acceptable for your class.
Videos should be between 5 and 8 minutes long. Videos this size are quite large- too large for our learning management system. Students should upload the videos to a platform that can handle the video size, such as OneDrive, Google Drive, YouTube, etc.
An example of a slide deck supporting a deep dive project (this is written in student-facing language)
- Introduction slide to introduce your work and yourself with the name of your presentation, your name, date, course
- Purpose of your project slide with the question you tackled with your project
- Overview of your work slide with a description of the topic(s) you chose, why they were important to you, and how you conducted your deep dive
- Guiding question: the question that guided your deep dive with your answer- what’s the problem you are looking into?\
- Relevance of this project: Why this topic is important and who it affects
- Point 1 from your readings
- Point 2 from your readings
- Point 3 from your readings (and so on)
- Recap of question and answer: Final answer
- Next steps: What people can do with this information
- Conclusion: Closing
- References
✓A note from Bridget: I have my students use Screenpal (Screenpal.com, formerly Screencastomatic) as it is a simple recording tool that allows short presentations to be recorded for free. Students can record just the screen, just themselves, or both themselves and the screen. It can be recorded directly on YouTube or other locations or their computer.
Big Picture Assessment
Sometimes assessment in this sense is confused with grading or testing students. This is actually a separate thing, which may or may not be part of the course assessment. As part of the general education curriculum at Lehman LEH 250 is assessed to determine if students have made progress to achieving the institutional learning outcomes. LEH 250 occurs at the start of this process, and students are not expected to be at the level that the that graduating students will be. They should, however, be started along the process. The overall plan for general education assessment is managed by subcommittees of the Undergraduate Curriculum Committee. We value your contribution to the continuous work on LEH 250.
describes a six part process. They are
- Step 1: Develop student learning outcomes or performance outcomes that align with Lehman College’s mission, its institutional learning goals, and, where applicable, accreditation requirements;
- Step 2: Determine or modify criteria for measuring success;
- Step 3: Develop and implement methods of assessment involving direct and indirect measures;
- Step 4: Collect and analyze data;
- Step 5: Plan and carry out improvement initiatives, and;
- Step 6: Document assessment and improvement activities.
- Steps 4-6 Lay out the annual assessment cycle that is part of the multi-year six-step process.
– Lehman Assessment Office
We will work collaboratively to provide an assessment for LEH 250 that is not burdensome for faculty.