1. Products / Reflections / … UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES?
NW Bio 2018
Reaffirming and Assessing Achievement of Biology Major Learning Objectives
Linfield College
Catherine Reinke, Jeremy Weisz, Jeff Brown
VISION – Create the infrastructure to motivate students for life-long learning and STEM careers.
MAIN GOAL– Update departmental learning outcomes, review core courses to identify scaffolding opportunities.
Photos should be at least 300dpi, but not more than 5-12 mgs each. Your poster is set to be enlarged 200% so do not change the page size to fit another poster size. Posters (3’ x 4’) will be printed at WWU using the same purchase order at the same time. Please your poster as a PPT file to by Joann Otto at WWU by Friday, April 13, 2018, by 5 pm. Please contact Joann Otto with questions about poster printing. Also please put your institution “logo” on your poster.
Please note that this template is provided to simplify your effort to prepare a poster for the NW Biology meeting. You can change the font size, colors, column widths, add photos, institutional logos, graphics, etc. This template can also be used as a starting point and you can be as creative as you want in your poster. However, we would like to have all of the posters the same size and we will be printed at the same time, at the same print shop in order to easily pay for printing with one purchase order.
ACTIONS
BARRIERS & CHALLENGES
Products / Reflections / …
Faculty discussed our core curriculum by sharing examples/evidence from each upper-division core course.
Faculty reviewed, discussed and evaluated their courses in light of our draft departmental competencies.
Initial concern by faculty regarding time required for thorough discussions: more initial enthusiasm for action than necessary preliminary discussion
Time is always a limiting factor
Products: planned curricular revision focused on student writing and oral presentations, development of ideas to address departmental learning outcomes in specific courses
Assessments: Will be developed
RESOURCES & ALLIES
STRENGTHS & LEVERAGE
SUSTAINABILITY
Vision and Change Rubrics were used to shape new departmental learning outcomes.
Allies: Department chair supported & valued this work, scheduled time in department meetings and encouraged broad faculty participation in additional meetings
Strengths: Department is invested in the process of curricular development and improvement.
Team and department are accountable and want a finished product.
Lever: Upcoming accreditation requires updated departmental learning objectives.
Accreditation requires that we continue and complete this effort to update departmental learning outcomes.
We seek data about effective assessment strategies from other institutions in the region and across the country. ✔ ✔ ✔
UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES?
FUTURE GOALS
Faculty were enthusiastic about scaffolding/vertical integration of courses, and backwards design. A broad realization that the reality is different than our assumptions…we had misconceptions about content or competencies developed in other courses.
Complete mapping core courses to departmental learning outcomes
Assessments … ✔
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This work was supported NSF RCN UBE award #