Making Learning Visible

Abstract

Professor Thompson will describe his experiences at Duke with reshaping undergraduate education and assessing learning outcomes of curricular and pedagogical initiatives at the college and department/program levels. Duke's assessment approaches include student self reports and direct measures, focused on critical thinking and writing. Thompson will discuss implications for learning from systematic measurement of students' intellectual work. This session will describe how the Intercampus Program in Communication Disorders identified and measured learning goals in the MA speech-language pathology program. We will share our process of developing measurable, program-wide goals and levels of performance, as well as the program rubric itself. In addition, we will discuss our initial implementation of a program portfolio for entering students and provide an example portfolio. This session will focus on the Graduate Evaluation Matrix, used by School of Nursing faculty to evaluate our masters in nursing students' competencies. Structure, process, and outcomes of the students' final oral examinations will be described. Assessment qualities such as evaluation compiled from data over time, from multiple perspectives, and involving a synthesis of evaluation data will be considered.