12 Program Assessment
In its first year, TLH developed a comprehensive program assessment plan informed by transformative humanities methodologies. Our faculty co-directors decided it was in the best interest of the program to conduct surveys using a Likert scale for most questions. We decided not to collect D, F, and W data about students in fellows’ courses because we know that the majority of students drop out of college for financial reasons and these data would not be an accurate measure of TLH’s impact. Finally, we decided to ask faculty to self-identify their gender and race/ethnicity. While this made assessing demographic data slightly more time-consuming, it allowed faculty to show us who they are, and, in the end, we were able to showcase a body of fellows far more diverse than any predetermined categories would have allowed.
In addition to developing a logic model and surveys for faculty fellows and students, which you will find below, TLH took seriously the success of each of its public-facing events. At the end of every event in our Transformative Speaker Series, we surveyed participants to ask them what they learned, what they thought about the length of the event, and how many students they teach (to gauge the indirect impact of the series). These surveys helped us to measure the success of the series and to improve each event. For example, we learned early on that participants preferred brief introductions to get to the heart of the content sooner. We quickly adapted to limit introductions to a few sentences, so we could give more time to our invited speakers. Instead of long intros, we honored their impressive work by putting their full bios in the Eventbrite pages advertising the events.
Surveying Faculty Fellows
Surveying Students
Students taking courses with faculty fellows directly benefitted from TLH methods, and we surveyed them at the beginning and end of their coursework to assess the immediate impact of TLH methods.
Initial Findings from Student Surveys
We surveyed students enrolled in classes taught by TLH faculty fellows in the fall 2021 and spring 2022 semesters. For all students who completed both surveys, responses they gave at the semester’s end were compared to the responses they gave at the semester’s beginning. Selected results, which are based on responses from between 480 and 486 students (varies by question), are included below. All cited effects are small.
- Students’ familiarity with various active learning methods increased over the course of the semester
- Students were more likely to agree that their input would be useful in planning a class syllabus at the semester’s end than they were at the semester’s beginning
- Students were more confident in their ability to engage in the following activities at the semester’s end than they were at the semester’s beginning, suggesting that TLH active learning methods helped bolster student confidence in areas critical to learning.
- Learning completely new concepts and ideas
- Becoming proficient in a new strategy for approaching problems
- Reflecting on what they learned and how they might use those skills in the future
- Communicating their needs as a learning to their instructors
- Bringing their own experiences and expertise into the classroom
- Finally, at the semester’s end, 93% of students strongly agreed (61%) or agreed (32%) with the statement, “Active learning is HELPFUL to my learning,” and 87% strongly agreed (50%) or agreed (37%) they would recommend courses that use active learning to their peers.