Lesson 1: Developing an Assessment Plan Schedule

One of the main goals of assessment work is to gather and analyze data that will inform curriculum changes. It is a thoughtful, deliberate and methodical process designed to improve learning. However, doing assessment work may seem overwhelming and daunting if you try to assess ever SLO ever year.

The good news is that you don't have to do that. It is considered best practice to stagger your assessments of each SLO so that you are only assessing one SLO a year. Staggering your assessments makes both the assessment work and the curriculum revisions more manageable. It also gives you time between each curriculum revision to gather more assessment data in order to determine if the curriculum changes have been effective.

How to Develop an Assessment Plan Schedule

To develop an assessment plan schedule you need to start with listing your SLOs and then determine which years you will evaluate each SLO. Remember that to keep assessment effective but manageable, you should only conduct a complete assessment analysis for one SLO a year. If it will be more manageable and if you want to look at data year over year, you can gather data and score assessment assignments every year. However analyzing the assessments and develop curriculum improvements recommendations should only be done in the year that your schedule indicates you will be assessing that particular SLO.

Note: If you are not interested in a year over year assessment analysis or if you have enough students in one year to make the assessment data actionable you can also decide to only assess the data from the year that you are assessing a particular SLO.

Assessment Plan Example

File:Assessment Plan Schedulev3.pdf