ILLC Meeting Notes 5-10-17

Meeting Details

• Date:  5/10/17
• Time:  11:10 am to 12 noon
• Place:  35-319B
• Attendance:  Jack Phelan, Katherine O'Clair, Amy Wiley, Mary Glick, Marilyn Tseng, Carol Curiel, Martin Mehl, Kayla Bussert, Bruno Giberti

Business

Much deliberation on prior target of upper-division C4 and D5 courses. Numerous concerns. Information Literacy is also not explicitly stated as a goal for the GE courses. Many juniors and even some sophomores are in these classes. We need to be targeting seniors at or near graduation.

Could the senior project be a focus for upper division assessment?

Problems with Senior Project Assessment 

• There are disciplinary differences.
• It is difficult to assess the different disciplines as a group with a single rubric.
• There is often not much clarity surrounding the guidelines for senior projects.

Benefits of Senior Project Assessment 

• The sample is convenient.
• The population is entirely composed of near-graduating seniors.
• Senior projects seem more likely to demonstrate information literacy even if it’s not explicitly stated in the guidelines for the project.

Ultimately, we will not be able to take results from different senior level programs and put them together methodologically. The senior level assessments are like ‘soundings.’ We are not going to get one result that can represent the performance of all Cal Poly seniors because it is not practical. We are trying to demonstrate what a Cal Poly degree means in terms of student competency. The end of this process doesn’t have to be an assessment with a distribution of students on a rubric.

The fact that there is no mention of Information Literacy beyond A1 and A3 needs to be addressed.

For Upper Division, Fall is too early to collect for spring-graduating seniors. but we will have to work with the schedule of when senior projects and classes are offered. Some students graduate in the winter or fall so we may be able to collect throughout the year.

• May have to be open to assessing either the senior project or a more impactful 400 level courses.
• We are trying to assess the skill level of seniors, wherever that happens.
• We have a recommendation that the senior project policy (written in 2001) needs to be revised because it gives little guidance as to the nature of the capstone.
• It may be proposed that every senior project should be addressing all or most of the core competencies and all or most of the program learning objectives. There are challenges to this across disciplines. In English, a senior project option is being an editor for Byzantium publications à how do you turn that in?
• We would have to start by getting a sense of the range of projects that count as the capstone experience across disciplines and colleges and then make a decision about how to use that to assess the value added from the course. Some of the legitimate senior projects for certain disciplines wouldn’t be able to be affectively assessed.
• We must remember that getting negative results also constitutes solid findings. à e.g. we looked at a range of assignments, we didn’t find it consistently addressed in all disciplines.
• If information literacy is not explicitly addressed, there is no point in looking at it, only if there is an implication of information literacy.
• In particular departments, would we expect to see a student’s best work in a specific class or senior class project? Where are the students supposed to be demonstrating information literacy?
• The rubric can be developed in early summer.
• Strategy change scope 400 level courses in addition to the senior project to allow for the reality that there will not be consistency across disciplines.
• The priority is to assess senior level work.

Action Items

• Start talking to department heads about possibilities for assessment.
• Katie will assemble possible 400 level courses to evaluate.