ALL UNIVERSITY STUDENT LEARNING OUTCOMES ASSESSMENT COMMITTEE

SUBCOMMITTEE ON COMMUNITY CONVERSATIONS MEETING NOTES

MARCH 2, 1998

In attendance were: Shiu-Kai Chin, David Miller, Vince Tinto, Gary Spencer, Ron Cavanagh, Frank Wilbur, Bron Adam, Ruth Stein, and Peter Gray

We identified some possible goals for the community conversations including:

1. to create ownership beyond the AUSLOAC and pilot groups
2. to help faculty members across the University feel comfortable with assessment
3. to communicate to faculty members that assessment will shape SU into the future
4. to help faculty members understand why we are doing assessment, and how they can become engaged in assessment

This subcommittee is responsible for overseeing and facilitating the dissemination of information to the campus community about what assessment is all about, to increase the comfort level, to build ownership, and to diffuse anxiety.

It was suggest that people will come to community conversations for emotional reasons. The idea of assessment may be unsettling or interesting. They may be more willing to attend if a respected colleague asked them.

Vince suggested that we should hope to generate from the conversations what the community feels the goals of an SU education are. And we should try to generate expressions of how they are already assessing their work.

We could:

1. map current assessment at SU
2. establish goals for an SU education
3. inform the SU community of the assessment initiative
4. draw people into the effort
5. discuss opinions (pro and con) about the national and international assessment movement
6. explore characteristics of learners at SU

David suggested that our role is to listen to our colleagues. We should ask groups to identify issues in assessment or we might ask them to respond to "case studies." The main point to get across is that assessment at SU is based on the notion that we all want to do what we do well and we want to improve it. The question is, how do we go about this?

We can provide people with a context and describe the pressures for assessment. We can respond to questions as they come up naturally about the context and pressures at SU and elsewhere, about AUSLOAC, and about the Chancellor's and Vice Chancellor's positions.

Gary described the assessment process in the Sociology Department where they have been working on the development of collective goals and have been moving from isolated courses to collective responsibility for the curriculum. The first step is coming to a judgment about, "what we should do."

It was pointed out that some faculty members have more in common with those outside their academic department, at least on an intellectual level. Therefore, we might have to organize conversations with some other "groups" as well as with departments or programs.

We will meet again on the March 24, 1998, at 2 PM in the CSTL conference room.