TVCA Integration:  Case Studies

All of the courses under review in these case studies are highly enrolled, front door courses that are key to a student’s success in our college.  The dialogs that are briefly described here have grown out of the work encouraged by the TVCA Integration Project.  These discipline-based discussions begin with a consideration of the course outcomes and proceed to the questions of evidence of student learning.  The assessment of learning is a difficult topic and it is likely that dialogs will need to continue for some time to come.

On March 1, 2003 the TVCA Integration and Assessment project hosted a seminar on departmental assessment of student learning through the method of holistic scoring. (TVCA Assessment Seminar).  Over thirty faculty attended this Saturday morning seminar.  They were on course-based teams drawn from the ongoing TVCA Integration work in Humanities, Speech, Reading, Spanish, and English for Academic Purposes (EAP).  The seminar drew upon in-house expertise by inviting professors from our Communications Departments, Jane Renfroe, Celine Kevalac-Miller, Penny Villegas, Linda Anthon, and Nick Bekas. One of these experts in holistic scoring and the creation of rubrics facilitated each team.  (Rubrics developed at the Assessment Seminar.)  As a follow-up to this event, several of the teams have committed to designing a course embedded assessment during Summer Session A for use in a departmental assessment process in academic year 2003-04.

It is worth highlighting the fact that the role of at least one dean is prominent in each of these case studies.  To establish an improvement process based upon cyclical analysis of evidence of student learning is one of the goals of the TVCA Integration Project.  Dean leadership of this effort will be crucial, as will faculty control of the design and analysis of the assessments.  These case studies represent incremental steps toward a new structure that will sustain an ongoing improvement process.  For an update on the progress to date in these courses, click on the following:

College Prep Mathematics

College Prep Reading

Speech

Humanities

Spanish