Collaborative Assessment at Cerritos College
Cerritos College fosters collaborative assessment because it promotes department consensus over individual preference, assessment process over assessment results, and faculty participation over faculty evaluation.
Collaborative assessment asks that faculty work together to develop course SLOs and their respective assessment tools, and when appropriate, to assess student work. Once the work is assessed, department faculty work together to analyze the results of the assessment and to develop plans to improve student learning. In this way, the faculty derives a consensus concerning student learning at various stages of the process.
Collaborative assessment best promotes collegiality when conducted at the course level through large multi-sectional courses. Assessing at the course-level focuses assessment on improvement, not on individual sections, instructors, or students, but on the department, so that improvement of student learning remains a collective endeavor. Also, assessing large multi-sectional courses is more apt to involve the greatest numbers of faculty in every phase of the SLO assessment cycle.
By working collaboratively at the course level, SLO assessment also becomes both a summative and formative process. It is summative in that the results of the assessment summarize how well students learned the knowledge and skills articulated in the SLOs. It is formative in that the summative results are analyzed by department faculty and used to form plans to improve student learning in subsequent semesters.
Finally, the collaborative process is the foundation for the assessment of Program and Institutional SLOs. Course-level SLOs are aligned to course outlines and individual course syllabi. These courses are in turn aligned to the appropriate program and institutional SLOs. The SLO Committee works with faculty from across campus to develop program and institutional SLOs, to assess student work, and to plan and implement improvements for student learning.
Cerritos College fosters collaborative assessment that allows faculty to reflect on how well their students are learning, and to develop and implement plans to improve that learning. In this way, Cerritos College is implementing an assessment process that promotes success in both teaching and learning.
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