SLO Assessment Guide for Faculty

As a faculty member, you will be involved in assessment of your course SLOs. You will be aided in the process through the use of elumen, which should make inputting, reviewing, and improving SLO assessments scores significantly easier. Even with these changes, SLO assessment remains the same four-step process:

  1. Reviewing Course SLOs
  2. Selecting and Using SLO Assessments for Course SLOs
  3. Reviewing SLO Assessment Results
  4. Completing Action Plans

Since each of these steps involves elumen, you will find below an explanation of each step and a link to instructions for completing that step in elumen.

Click here to view this year's Course and Degree/Certificate SLO Deadlines 

1. Reviewing Course SLOs

The first step in the new year’s assessment process is to review the SLOs for each of your courses. The department chair should lead a review of all course SLOs, but in case this does not occur, you should review the SLOs for those courses you teach, and if, after reviewing the course SLOs, you wish to add, revise, or deactivate any course SLOs, you should speak to your department chair and discuss the changes with members of your department, particularly those who also teach the course.

2. Selecting and Using Assessments

Once you are comfortable with the course SLOs, you need to choose the best method for assessing those SLOs. The SLO Committee recommends that you use existing assignments, essays, exams, and/or projects to assess the SLO. It is not required, but the committee highly recommends that you assess all of the SLOs, because it provides you with the clearest picture of what your students are learning well and what they need help with.

The three ways that elumen best accommodates you using your existing assignments, exams, essays, etc. to assess your SLOs are rubrics and Excel spreadsheets or TalonNet.  

Option 1: Rubric Assessments

One method that many departments are using on campus is using a final essay or project to assess all of the course SLOs. This works particularly well in disciplines like English or Woodworking, in which the student is building on skills so that their last project should presumably be their best.

If you decided to use a rubric, you may submit your own rubric, or we can build a generic rubric for you. Most departments have used our generic rubric with much success. To create the generic rubric we simply take the SLOs for the course and add a qualitative phrase for each assessment category.

For instance, an SLO might read: Students analyze specific passages and thematic issues . . .

  • To establish the good criteria, we add to the SLO this bolded phrase “Students demonstratea sophisticated abilityto analyze specific passages and thematic issues . . .”
  • To describe the satisfactory category, we add to the SLO this bolded phrase “Students demonstrate a limited but adequate ability to analyze specific passages and thematic issues . . .”
  • To describe the emergent category, we add to the SLO this bolded phrase “Students demonstrate little or no ability to analyze specific passages and thematic issues . . .”

Departments using the rubrics generally use a final paper or project. They grade a student paper or project then assess the student’s performance of the SLOs based on that final paper or project.

Option 2: Gradebook Assessments—Excel

You may wish to use your spreadsheet gradebooks to assess your SLOs. In this case you would identify one or more assignments, essays, exams, projects, etc. that assess the SLOs and at the end of the semester make some minor modifications to a saved copy of your spreadsheet and upload that spreadsheet to elumen

Option 3: Gradebook Assessments—TalonNet
For those of you using TalonNet, it offers a very easy way to assess SLOs using the gradebook, especially if you have more than one assignment for each SLO. You can use the category feature of TalonNet, identifying each SLO as a separate category and assigning the assignments, quizzes, etc. to the respective SLO categories.

To import your TalonNet gradebook into elumen, export the scores in an Excel spreadsheet.

3. Reviewing your Assessment Results

After inputting your assessment scores, you will want to review the your overall results. You can do this by downloading a report from elumen.

4. Completing the Course Section Action Plan

Once you have completed your assessments you will review the results for your courses and write what elumen calls an Action Plan, what we have called an Improvement Plan.