Annual Assessment Progress Report

AREA A OUTCOME 2

Year: Spring 2009Program: Communication

Please describe your assessment activities for this academic year.

  1. List the outcomes assessed during this cycle.

Outcome 2: Upon completing Comm 100, students will be able to deliver a speech using effective verbal and nonverbal skills.

  1. Provide a brief description of how each outcome was assessed including the process and participants.

To get a diverse sample of all Communication 100 courses, we decided to record a section’s worth of speeches from all instructors (Floss, MacKinney, Bruner, Smith-Young, Young, Dobie, Amundsen) teaching Comm 100 during the Spring 2009 semester. As with Outcome 1, we

assessed a combination of informative and persuasive speeches. The rubric (see attached) was developed through consultation with members of the department. Bruner, Hahn, and Schnurer pilot tested the rubric for four of the speeches. After reliability was established, Hahn and Paynton completed the assessment. Speeches were rated as either “superior,” “good,” “minimally acceptable,” and “substandard.”

  1. Describe the major findings from this assessment cycle.

Of all 12 speeches :1 was “superior,” 4 were “good,” 5 were “minimally acceptable,” and 2 were “substandard.” The results were consistent across class sections and seem to reveal similar areas for improvement. These included elements of delivery, organization, use of transition and preview statements, and lack of research and source citations.

  1. Explain what action you are going to take based on the assessment results and why.

Given the overall poor quality, we want to engage in discussions about setting more rigorous standards and consistency of assignments across sections. While there is reluctance and disagreement about creating a uniform set of requirements for each class, we believe a collective understanding of various pedagogical approaches would be fruitful at this point of the process.

  1. Reflect on the assessment process itself. What if any changes do you want to make?
  • The rubric for SLO 1 was designed so that reviewers would score each element individually; however, as indicated in that report, we agreed that it was more effective to use the elements as collective criteria for evaluating the overall effectiveness of the outline. So, in the creation of the rubric for SLO 2 we were able to design it to capture the overall picture of the speech, while also having identifiable criteria for evaluation and reflection. In essence the rubric was effective, useful, and captured consistency between reviewers.
  • As the number of students enrolled in a section of Comm 100 has increased over the years, we see that this has a direct impact on student performance. The amount of students that must be given speaking time limits one, the amount of time that the instructor can work with each individual, and two, the opportunities for students to engage in practice or non-graded speaking activities.