Lesson 3: How to develop success benchmarks?

According to Linda Suskie in her textbook Assessing Student Learning: A Common Sense Guide, there are a few guidelines to consider when setting success benchmarks. These guidelines are especially important if you have to defend your benchmarks to a skeptical audience who need to be persuaded that they are logical, rational and reasonable. The guidelines are as follows:

• Focus on what will not embarrass you. As stated early, the benchmarks should reflect the minimally acceptable student achievement or performance. You need to decide what that is, however, keep in mind that you should think about the lowest level of achievement that wouldn't embarrass you if students graduated at that level of performance.
• Be clear on how the evidence is being used. Setting benchmarks is somewhat subjective.
• Knowing how you will use them can help you determine if they should be set higher or lower. For example, you should set a higher benchmark if you want to do the following:
  • Identify areas that need improvement as higher benchmarks make it easier to see where the problem areas are.
  • Ensure that the college allocates funds to help improve curriculum in problem areas as higher benchmarks provide valid and reliable support about areas that need improvement.
  • Ensure that students are proficient in the program knowledge and skills as higher benchmarks are more likely to ensure that graduates are competent in the course material.
• Express targets as percentages, not averages. Percentages are more meaningful and useful than averages. For example, it is easier to understand and more useful to have a benchmark that states 85% of students must meet proficiency on all criteria than to have one that states students need to earn an average of 2.8 on a 4 point scale.
• Use sample student work to inform your benchmarks. Review work from previous years. Include work that shows all different performance levels. Ask yourself and your colleagues the following questions:
  • Which work would be at the mastery level? What is it about this work that makes it exemplary?
  • What about work at the proficiency level? developing level? and needs improvement level?
  • How do the works at each of these levels differ?
  • What percentages of work fall into each level? Are these percentages acceptable for your program? Or should they be revised?

Tips for determining benchmark & target levels?

Some goals are basic, required learning and some are aspirational. You should set you benchmarks and targets differently depending on whether the learning goal addresses a required student learning outcome for the program or the learning is aspirational, i.e. something we hope student learns but is not a required SLO.

• For basic learning goals that address required SLOs your benchmark should be proficient and your target should be high, like 85% or higher. Remember not every student will meet the required benchmark so it is important to have your target close to 100% but not at 100%
• For aspiration learning goals, you want some students to achieve them but you don't expect all students to reach them. These are learning goals that challenge students to get out of their comfort zone and perform at a higher level. Examples of aspirational goals would be to become an inspirational public speaker, to write a compelling work of fiction, or conduct a publish-worthy scholarly research study.
  • While aspirational goals may vary depending on how difficult they are, you may want use the 50% rule, which says that your target should be no less than 50%. This rule is based on the assumptions that "most students want to study and get a good grade, and it's very difficult to write hard test questions and assignments. Under these premises, more than half the students getting a question wrong or failing a particular part of an assignment suggests something is wrong. The problem probably lies not with the student but with teaching methods, curriculum, or the test or assignment itself" (Suskie, 2018).