With the development of Student Learning Outcomes, or SLOs, instructors are able to nail down exactly what they expect students to know by the end of a course.
One of the recommendations given by the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC) to all three of the campuses within the district was to develop a timeline for SLOs.
By 2012, every class and program on campus will have to complete the assessment process and summarize its results, SLO Coordinator and economics professor Wendy Williams said.
“(The ACCJC) wants us to analyze what we need to do better, whether it’s changing lectures, assignments or the emphasis (of a certain course),” she said.
The first step of the assessment process is to develop SLOs for every individual class, Williams said.
Then, each department must write exact statements of where they are in the assessment process, College Instruction Committee Coordinator Jason Berner said.
Vice President Carol Maga said that most of the departments have been making progress.
According to a form regarding SLOs on the college Web site, the form is divided into three parts.
In the first two columns, instructors must fill out intended course outcomes and how outcomes will be assessed.
The final column, assessment criteria, determines how the success of the outcome will be measured, Berner said.
Each outcome identifies something specific relating to a particular course, he said.
For example, in an English class, an outcome can be whether a student can write a satisfactory thesis or not. The assessment method, or data, can include writing samples, such as final exams.
If at least 75 percent of the students are able to write an adequate thesis, the outcome has been successful.
“There are a variety of ways to measure whether students are learning, and SLOs is one of them,” Maga said.
All programs, from academic courses to EOPS, are required to fill out SLO forms, she said. Each department determines what the outcomes are and how they will be accomplished.
SLOs are a component of what is known as the program review process, which each department undergoes every two to four years, Berner said.
The collected data from the SLOs will be put into the overall program review report, he said.
During the program review process, instructors can request for resources, such as money to hire more tutors, update software programs or more videos for supplemental information to better help them accomplish their outcomes, Williams said.
Once the program reviews have been submitted, the information from them is given to those in charge of allocation.
Williams said faculty who have gone through the process of developing their SLOs felt it was “a lot of work” but in the end proved helpful by letting them know what they needed to improve in order to most effectively teach their students.
Contact Lauren Shiraishi at lshiraishi.advocate@gmail.com
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