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The Ideal Curricular Assessment

When: Friday, March 27, 2015
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Where: Claire T. Carney Library, Room 314
Description: The Ideal Curricular Assessment—An Easily Administered, Computerized Simulation to Assess Students’ Abilities to Use What They’ve Learned to Solve Real-World Problems

Abstract:
The Undergraduate Affairs Committee (UAC) of the Psychology Department feels strongly that if we are to use assessment of student learning outcomes as a basis for continuous improvement, the assessment should be of something that matters to us. We believe that the most important gift we can give undergraduates is a skill set that permits them to reason empirically, critically, and independently. Toward that end we developed a set of web-based simulations in which the students are asked to advise a group of their relatives who are researching a specific claim. We based our simulations on a similar set developed and validated with computer engineering students. We developed four different simulations and have given the first two assessments to sophomore and senior Psychology majors. Our first goal is to see if the seniors have developed these skills relative to the sophomores. Our second goal is to identify students’ strengths and weaknesses so we can revise our curriculum to address the weaknesses. This presentation will describe the development process, demonstrate the simulation, describe our preliminary results, and discuss our future plans, including closing the loop on both the students’ performance and on our assessment.
Topical Areas: Training, Workshop, audience: Faculty, topic: Faculty Development
Registration: Registration is required for this event. If you do not see a registration box or a UMassD Login form here: