• Prospective Students
• Students
• Faculty/Staff
• Alumni
• Community Partners
• Parents

• Core Curriculum
• Learning Objectives and Assessment
• Featured Faculty
• For students
• Core Requirements
• Core Substitution
• For Faculty
• Contact

Featured Course Assessments

Anthropology Department Engages in Constructive Review of Core Courses
By Deborah Boehm, dboehm@unr.edu and Erin Stiles, estiles@unr.edu

In Anthropology, we have an Assessment Committee with representatives from the four subfields (Archaeology, Cultural, Linguistics, and Physical).  During summer and fall 2008, we focused on the assessment of courses that are part of the Core Curriculum, including ANTH 101 (Introduction to Cultural Anthropology), ANTH 102 (Introduction to Physical Anthropology), ANTH 201 (Peoples and Cultures of the World), and ANTH 202 (Archaeology).  With the input of faculty members who teach the courses, we developed assessment plans with Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs) for each class, and also assessment tools and rubrics for evaluating student performance.

Coordinating assessment for ANTH 101 (Introduction to Cultural Anthropology) has been both challenging and productive, and illustrates the opportunities assessment offers for pedagogical development.  Anthropology 101 is a popular course; each semester we typically have four sections capped at 150-200 students.  These sections are taught by a diverse group of instructors—department faculty members, temporary faculty, and graduate students—and our assessment plan was developed through conversations among those who currently teach the course.  Our initial SLOs focused on broad learning goals that all of our instructors share, namely building students’ understanding of and/or ability to engage with 1) anthropological theories and methods, 2) the concept of culture and cultural diversity in global perspective, and 3) critical thinking skills.  While there was certainly overlap—for example, the knowledge of central theories facilitates critical thinking—these common objectives served as a fruitful starting place for implementing assessment across sections.

We discovered that the assessment tools that were particularly useful were those that were embedded within existing course assignments, including common exam questions and student papers, and so our future assessment will incorporate additional embedded indicators.  We also realized the importance of formally communicating with instructors, especially because they rotate frequently, about the department’s learning and assessment goals.  Assessment of the course was also instructive in that it initiated reflection about innovative ways to teach material to large and diverse groups of students, anthropology majors and minors as well as students taking the course as an elective or to fulfill the Core social science requirement. Our efforts also initiated a productive discussion among anthropology faculty—many of whom are new to UNR—about department assessment and curriculum more broadly.

Using Online Tools to Assess Lectures and Labs in Environmental Studies
By Julie Stoughton, jstoughton@cabnr.unr.edu

When I first started teaching ENV 100 – Humans and the Environment, I was fairly new to college teaching, and I wanted a tool to get student feedback about the course.  One of my colleagues, Dr. Laurel Saito, introduced me to an online assessment tool developed by the National Science Foundation.  The Student Assessment of Learning Gains (SALG) tool sounded like a great way to get student feedback.  I used the online SALG template, modified it slightly for my course, and asked students to complete the online assessment for extra credit points at the end of the semester.

SALG asks students to assess each part of a course in terms of their learning gains, so it avoids a common teaching evaluation pitfall of asking students whether they “liked” a course or “liked” an instructor.  The initial student feedback about the course was positive overall, but a few comments stuck out.  When asked about ENV 100 labs, several students commented that “there was no connection between lecture and labs” or “labs were useless.”  Clearly every course has a few students who are unhappy no matter what you do, but I thought the lab comments merited attention. 

I began thinking about ways to improve the labs for ENV 100 to make them more relevant for students.  There were a couple rounds of minor lab revisions before settling on a lab theme that addressed another set of student assessment comments – students liked the lecture topics that discussed our local environment.  The new organizing theme for our labs became Truckee River Watershed Science.  Now we had a better topic for integrating lectures and lab, for engaging students with local environments, and for teaching environmental science methods.

Back to the assessment tool – it was time to modify the SALG questions to assess the new labs.  I changed the survey from a general question about how “labs” led to learning gains to four questions about our four specific labs.  How did the watershed introduction lab help their learning? How did the riparian vegetation lab help their learning? Etc.  Now I had student feedback and comments about each individual lab.

About the same time as I was planning lab revisions, I decided to include a pre-course assessment using SALG.  I didn’t have the questions I needed for a full-scale knowledge survey, so I asked students to self-assess their knowledge level about each of the topics we discuss in ENV 100.  The post-course survey asks about the same set of topics, and I can compare the pre- and post-course rankings to look for statistical differences.  Once the lab theme changed, I added another topic (watersheds) to the pre- and post-course survey so I could look for self-assessed improvements in knowledge of watersheds.

I continue to use student comments from the SALG tool to improve the labs, and in the future I hope to develop a detailed knowledge survey that will pinpoint actual learning gains from our labs and point to possible future improvements.  Now the online pre- and post-course SALG survey is a regular assignment for my students. 

By starting with a modest goal of getting feedback about my course I have been able to make modifications and then assess those modifications by making small changes to questions in the SALG tool.  This is a free, easy to use tool that any program could use for student assessment.

Back to top