NESTED LEARNING GOALS AS A TOOL FOR GEOLOGY PROGRAM ASSESSMENT

As accreditation needs, program evaluation, and accepted best practices, all drive geoscience educators to collect assessment data more regularly and more rigorously, a danger of assessment overload begins to creep into the process of curriculum design. Often a single course within a curriculum may find itself responsible for the assessment of multiple programmatic and/or collegewide learning goals on top of its own course learning goals. This assessment overload can in turn require course instructors to spend considerable time and effort designing, deploying and evaluating assessment tools with a frequency that can be both overwhelming, and detrimental to a thorough coverage of actual course material.

Reevaluating course learning goals specifically in the context of programmatic learning goals, and programmatic learning goals specifically in the context of collegewide learning goals, can result in the creation of nested, or hierarchical, learning goals that ameliorate the problem of assessment overload. Simply stated, if course learning goals are established as aspects of programmatic learning goals, and programmatic learning goals are established as aspects of collegewide learning goals, then assessing the course learning goals simultaneously assesses the larger goals in that hierarchy.

This presentation will use the Westminster College Geology Program as an extended case study in how to create nested learning goals while still maintaining a program’s unique identity and characteristics. It will also provide examples of how nested learning goals can be used to streamline the process of program evaluation. Finally, it will present data demonstrating the efficacy of nested learning goals for assessing both courses and programs.