From Seedlings to Harvest: Successes and Challenges of a Grassroots Approach to Assessment

Abstract

Impactful assessment must be responsive to its broader institutional context as well as immediate situational demands. At UCSC, our grassroots approach to equity-minded assessment has evolved in response to cultural values of faculty autonomy, institutional goals centered on equity, and a growing faculty need for support in effectively leveraging new technological tools. While our course-embedded approach has increased faculty engagement in meaningful assessment, we now face the challenge of scaling up this method to serve 130 undergraduate and graduate programs, which we hope to achieve through establishing faculty learning communities. In this session, we will share the processes, skills, and powerful CANVAS data collection tools that our Assessment Team has developed to support annual assessment of over 4000 freshmen in the College 1 course, an introductory critical reading and thinking course. We will discuss this project's successes as well as its ongoing challenges and the larger implications for program-level assessment.