Section 7. Assessment Activities

Faculty and administrators at Berkeley share a commitment to the intent of assessment (even if the term is not in common use)—a commitment to better understand how well students learn, what they learn, how they use what they learn, and when and where they learn. From individual courses and departments to the institution as a whole, the campus collects and uses a variety of data to assess student learning. Because we are a large campus characterized by a high degree of decentralization and strong autonomous departments, the institution of a single campus-wide standard or set of standards for student learning outcomes is not desirable. Rather, we employ various strategies at different levels to assess student learning. Here we briefly present our core values about student learning, our efforts to create a quality educational environment that promotes student learning, the ways we document student learning, and how we make use of student learning data to improve practice.

Core Values

The campus has been sharpening its focus and placing greater emphasis on teaching, learning, and undergraduate education. We are committed to providing students with the highest level of educational quality that capitalizes on our strengths as a research institution. Our broad vision for undergraduate education is characterized by four core values for our students as identified in our Institutional Proposal:

• Academic and Intellectual Engagement: opportunities to master new bodies of knowledge and to develop new skills;
  
• Research and Discovery: opportunities to work with, and be mentored by, leading researchers and scholars;
  
• Service to the Community: opportunities to link academic studies to real-world issues;
  
• Creative Achievement: opportunities to engage in a scholarly, scientific or artistic capstone project as a culminating experience.

We also have both implicit and explicit objectives defining what we want our undergraduate students to experience and to achieve. These objectives are based on our mission, values, faculty intentions in program and course design, on information from special task forces and committees related to undergraduate education, and on our knowledge of our students. They include:

• developing students' skills in writing, reasoning, critical analysis, logical thinking, information literacy, synthesis, and evaluation;
  
• helping students gain knowledge and appreciation of a specific area of inquiry and its interrelatedness to other areas;
  
• helping students gain a broad based understanding of the humanities and fine arts, physical and biological sciences, and the social sciences;
  
• exposing students to a range of divergent points of view;
  
• encouraging students to assume civic, political, and social responsibilities;
  
• helping students examine their own values, pursue their own intellectual interests, and become independent learners.

Efforts to Create a Quality Educational Environment

These objectives are met with varying degrees of success. For example, some but not all courses: (1) have established student learning outcomes defining what students should know or be able to do as a result of their coursework and educational experiences; and (2) have incorporated opportunities for active student engagement in learning (e.g., undergraduate research, service-learning, collaborative learning). Some but not all departments: (1) have created capstone courses; and (2) have articulated their curriculum with other departments' courses to help students understand the inter-relatedness of knowledge. In addition, some but not all students learn beyond the classroom by participating in community service activities, teaching a student-led course, or taking a leadership role in a student group.

We have made progress, but are not where we want to be with respect to the teaching/learning environment on campus. In terms of facilities, we have an ongoing classroom improvement project underway. Since the last WASC review, 60 of 240 general assignment classrooms have been upgraded with built-in digital technology. Five additional classrooms are scheduled for upgrades for the 2002-2003 budget year. All 240 general assignment classrooms have built-in Ethernet and can be served with portable projectors and other equipment. In the areas of advising and student services, we face challenges with integrating transfer students who must adapt to the campus in a short time period and access the information they need to make timely decisions about selecting a major. Due to limited financial resources, we face the challenges of impacted courses, overloaded advising staff, and academic support services that are spread thin.

Despite these challenges, we have had successes. We have encouraged and broadly disseminated innovations in teaching and learning (e.g., the Freshman Seminar Program). We tap into faculty members' innate curiosity about teaching and learning by offering summer institutes, forums, workshops, modest grants, and resources about best practices. We offer students a rich and varied curriculum and a range of opportunities for learning outside of the classroom. To foster and promote a positive climate for teaching and learning, we have established on-going successful collaborative partnerships among academic support units. A noteworthy recent example is a partnership between the Library, the Division of Undergraduate Education and the College of Letters & Science's Undergraduate Division, which resulted in a pilot grant from the Mellon Foundation to develop Mellon Library/Faculty Fellows for Undergraduate Research. This program is aimed at encouraging and facilitating faculty collaboration with the library and other campus partners to: a) build undergraduate knowledge of information resources; b) enhance student research and information competencies; c) connect faculty research more effectively with classroom teaching; and d) provide expanded opportunities for faculty to mentor creative student discovery and research both within and beyond the classroom. An important outcome of the Mellon grant has been the establishment of the Council of Academic Partners (CAP), which brings together for the first time senior staff involved with faculty development programs campus-wide. CAP is undertaking a number of collaborative projects aimed at transcending the organizational decentralization of faculty development resources on the campus.

Documenting Student Learning

Our efforts to document student learning can be grouped into three levels (individual, departmental, institutional) and two categories (direct and indirect measures).

At the individual level, faculty may employ a wide range of informal formative techniques to get feedback on whether students are learning the material and meeting course goals. In fact, the popular "Minute Paper" was developed by a Physics professor at Berkeley. Although faculty may not know they are engaged in "assessment," they solicit feedback from students in class, give quizzes and tests, conduct mid-semester evaluations, seek a supportive consultant to observe their courses, set up on-line chat rooms, ask students to summarize in writing the three major points of the day, and otherwise gather information on how well students are learning the course content. Some faculty have formalized their procedures for assessing student learning, particularly when they have significantly revised their courses or have created new ways of teaching. For example, Digital Chem 1A, a technology-enriched version of the campus's standard introductory chemistry course, received extramural support to evaluate its effectiveness compared to the traditional method.

Departments at Berkeley typically do not administer standardized tests of student learning; however, they do employ a variety of direct and indirect measures of student learning. At the departmental level, students may be surveyed routinely. Our data from the 2000-2001 Departmental Undergraduate Education Survey indicate that about one-third of departments and undergraduate programs survey graduating seniors. Close to 100% of departments and programs administer written course evaluations, with 8% of departments administering periodic surveys and 11% interviewing students. These student evaluations are used primarily to provide feedback to instructors and to be included in their merit reviews. However, 61% of departments reported using student evaluations in curricular planning and reform. Some departments are accredited by outside agencies which have learning outcomes criteria (e.g., Engineering). These departments may have created cultures of evidence stimulated in part by the accreditation process. Some departments undertake portfolio assessment: collections of student work that exhibit efforts, progress, and achievements (e.g., the College Writing Programs). Seventy-five percent of departments and undergraduate programs offer capstone experiences to honors students and 49% to non-honors students. The campus is committed to expanding these opportunities. Capstone experiences allow students to synthesize and apply skills and knowledge gained in the course of a Berkeley education toward the framing of a significant project involving original research, design, service or creative work. As such, they represent an important direct measure of student learning.

At the institutional level, the campus is actively engaged in assessment. Periodic surveys are administered by the Office of Student Research to assess our overall effectiveness, including in promoting student learning. The Career Center surveys students after graduation to identify their progress and activities after graduation from Berkeley. As part of the SERU-21 project, the campus is currently engaged in a system-wide survey (called UCUES), designed to identify factors associated with student academic success. Beyond surveys, the campus conducts regular program reviews of academic departments. The program review process is undergoing substantial modification and will have an expanded focus on student learning and student learning outcomes at the undergraduate level. Finally, since 1988 the campus has been collecting indicators related to thirteen commitments concerning undergraduate education. The Quality of Undergraduate Education Assessment Project (QUEAP) tracks data points every four years in order to monitor trends and address our shortcomings.

Because of its high degree of decentralization and the lack of a single campus unit charged with collecting or evaluating undergraduate student learning outcome data, Berkeley has evolved a multifaceted approach for outcomes assessment. Although we have improved in this area since the last WASC review, further progress is warranted.

Using Student Learning Data to Improve Practice

A key principle in research is "don't gather data you don't use." Unfortunately, we have not always adhered to this principle. We collect a great deal of data. Much of it is used for specific purposes, but much of it isn't fully analyzed or acted upon. In the case of student learning, faculty who gather formative data use it to improve the course in the semester in which they are teaching. This is the purest and clearest use of student assessment. Although we do not have data on how many faculty employ formative assessment techniques and how they use the resulting information for course improvement, we do have anecdotal evidence.

At the departmental level, we have not conducted any surveys of data utilization, but we know anecdotally that departments use information from student surveys to address problem areas. For example, the Physics Department is currently revising the physics sequence taken by students in biology, health sciences, and design, in part in response to both written surveys of students and follow-up focus groups that further probed problems identified. College Writing uses the results of its portfolio assessment to modify the way writing is taught, as appropriate. And formal evaluations of instructional innovations such as Digital Chem 1A are leading to changes in both the experimental and traditional versions of the course.

Data collected from program reviews have had mixed impact on departmental operations which is one reason the program review process is being modified. Campus-wide surveys have sometimes been too general to lead to meaningful, measurable changes. In other cases, such as in the example from the Physics Department above, targeted data collection is leading to specific improvements in the undergraduate curriculum. Finally, the Quality of Undergraduate Education Assessment Project (QUEAP) has not been fully leveraged to press for greater institutional support for assessment of student learning outcomes. In part, so much has changed since 1988 (including the web) that not all the indicators are still relevant. And in part, until recently, the campus has been unable to identify a mechanism for making sure that general information about student learning and undergraduate education gets into the hands of a responsible administrator. With the appointment of the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, we expect this will change.

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