GENERAL INFORMATION
Lunch and continental breakfast are included in the registration fee. Workshops will run concurrently on Friday, April 25, 2008 from 9:00am - 1:00pm. Registration check-in will be from 8:00am-9:00am. A continental breakfast will be served at this time for all workshop attendees.

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTIONS:

W1. Making Assessment Simple, Practical and Useful (this workshop has filled)
The workshop helps faculty and administrators plan assessment procedures that are simple, practical, and useful, as well as consonant with the requirements of accrediting agencies.  Participants will work with their own institutions’ or department’s goals for student learning, discussion issues such as how to state the goals and how to get departmental buy-in.  Next, participants will consider how to gather information about students’ achievement of the goals.  Participants will weigh the pros and cons of various methods, including classroom-based student work, portfolios, and surveys.  Finally, participants will explore how best to use assessment information for improvement.  We will outline the “basic, no-frills” departmental assessment plan.  We will discuss general-education assessment.  We will suggest how to write up your assessment activities for accrediting bodies.  The workshop will draw on Walvoord’s experience consulting on assessment with more than 300 institutions of higher education and her book, Assessment Clear and Simple (Jossey-Bass, 2004).
Facilitator: Barbara Walvoord, Chair of Assessment Committee, Fellow of the Institute for Educational Initiatives, and Concurrent Professor of English, University of Notre Dame

W2. An Outcomes-based Model for General Education: Intentional Planning, Teaching, and Assessment
This interactive workshop will engage participants in an assessment cycle designed to promote student learning, engage and empower faculty, and improve curriculum and programs.  The assessment cycle begins with a review of the institutional culture and mission and is complete when assessment data on student learning is used to improve the teaching and learning approaches.  The strategies of the cycle are highly effective for general education in that they contribute relevance, context, and focus to the curriculum along with connections to disciplinary learning across the institution.  The workshop will engage participants in the strategies of the assessment cycle –reviewing institutional culture for goal setting; designing goals, outcomes, criteria, and standards; aligning curriculum and pedagogy with the outcomes and criteria; and examining student work for direction to improve teaching and learning.   Examples from multiple campuses will be provided to enhance the understanding and application of the workshop content.
Facilitator: Amy Driscoll, Associate Senior Scholar, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching

W3. Moving Past Assessment Basics: Creating Rubrics to Assess Learning
Student Affairs programs often engage students through hands on experience and reflection.  Rubrics are an underutilized method of systematically measuring intended outcomes associated with these activities.  This session will explore the basics of developing rubrics, how to apply them in the field, and how to analyze the data in order to use it for decisions.  Participants will leave with real life examples of how rubrics might be used to measure a variety of common student affairs outcomes.
Facilitators: Carrie Zelna, Director of Student Affairs Research and Assessment, NC State; and Ted Elling, Director of Student Affairs Research, UNC Charlotte