1. What are the responsibilities of the unit chair/head regarding ACE?
The ACE document (#4, Section 3, B and Section VII, B) charges the department chair or head (or unit head in the case of colleges without chairs or heads) with the following responsibilities for ACE certified courses.
"A signature from the unit chair/head affirming that the Unit will:
See that the syllabus for each ACE-certified course clearly indicates the ACE Outcome(s) for which the course is certified, the opportunities the course will give students to acquire the knowledge or skills necessary to achieve the Learning Outcome(s), and the graded assignments the instructor(s) will use to assess the students' achievement of the Outcome(s).
Collect and assess in coordination with the ACE assessment cycle a reasonable sample of students' products and provide reflections on students' achievement of the Learning Outcomes for its respective ACE-certified courses.
Review and aggregate samples and summary assessments across course sections and semesters.
Draft a summary assessment across courses/sections that addresses:
General trends in the kinds of assignments used to assess student achievement of the appropriate ACE Learning Outcome(s).
General trends in students' achievement of the ACE Learning Outcomes.
The kinds of modifications that might improve student achievement.
Provide the results of these aggregated assessments, along with samples of student work, to the college's dean's office or the college committee responsible for program assessment."
2. The ACE program requires that faculty collect samples of student work. How much work needs to be collected for assessment purposes?
ACE: 4 Governance & Assessment (See Section VII) indicates that instructors for each ACE course should provide their department/unit with a reasonable sampling (at least three) of students' products from graded assignments identified as assessing students' achievement of the appropriate ACE learning outcome. Instructors should also provide their departments with their own assessment of those products.
The periodic recertification of ACE courses (See ACE: 4 Section VIII) requires that over time the department provide evidence that ACE courses have given students the opportunity to demonstrate achievement of the learning outcome(s) and that the department/unit has used that assessment evidence to improve courses. At the institutional level, assessment evidence will be used to determine whether the ACE program meets institutional objectives. It will NOT assess the effectiveness of individual instructors or courses.
3. One requirement asks that faculty and the department keeps and assesses a reasonable sample of students' work. How is "reasonable sample" defined?
The ACE program gives the departments/units the responsibility to determine how the learning outcome(s) need to be assessed. It is expected that this decision will be guided by both content (i.e. appropriate methods for assessing learning in the content area) and context (i.e. assessment methods that are practical for the context) of the course. Differences in content and context across ACE courses make prescribing a reasonable sample of students' work difficult, if not impossible. What a reasonable sample might be for a large introductory biology class, for example, will not be a reasonable sample for a 400-level English class. The General Education Advisory Committee that created the ACE documents entrusted departments with the power to determine what works for them and the integrity to make good faith efforts to collect that work and reflect upon how students are achieving the outcome(s) for which the course receives ACE-certification. To assist in decisions about "reasonable sample" the following considerations are provided.
Does the sample provide appropriate representation of:
the number of students enrolled in the course?
the type of students enrolled in the course (i.e. class level, college enrolled, major)?
how students in the course performed on graded ACE assignments?
If a department/unit offers multiple sections of an ACE course, the department/unit can determine whether assessment evidence should be collected from all or a sample of those course sections and what sampling method is reasonable. For this decision, the following considerations are provided.
Does the sample from course sections provide an appropriate representation of:
the type of instructors (i.e. graduate students, adjuncts, lecturers, faculty) assigned to course section?
the type of pedagogy used across course sections?
the type of students enrolled across course sections?
The representatives of each of the undergraduate colleges on the Interim ACE committee and the Course Facilitators are acutely aware of the need to minimize the burden on faculty and department/unit chairs and heads, while at the same time make assessment efforts meaningful. In the fall semester 2008 faculty and department will be offered assistance in making these decisions as well as making assessment part of the ACE program manageable. As the program builds, we will also provide more guidance about how the reflections about the assessments should be reported.
