Assessment/Retention Meeting Agenda and Moving along on a Grant Proposal
November 1, 2007 11:28:25 AM

Dear Christy and Mark, As was true for Christy, I also felt the meeting was of minds taken with combining technology and education. I've added more comments and topics to Christy's draft list.

I note here how quickly in our discussion education words -- raised by Christy -- seemed immediately valuable to the whole discussion. My most important addition to Christy's message may be that of sending us off on a path to searching for a proposal and getting campus support for the proposal. This is Item V below. Perhaps the second most important addition -- and tougher to write about -- used our discussion yesterday on curriculum to give a picture of exactly where assessment enters. This is Item II below.

Here is a list of the topics below:

  1. PROBLEM DEFINITION:
  2. SEEING ASSESSMENT IN CURRICULAR TERMS:
  3. USE OF TECHNOLOGY AND HOW IT SERVES EDUCATION GOALS:
  4. SOME PHRASES FROM OUR DISCUSSION:
  5. OUR NEXT STEPS AND CAMPUS SUPPORT:

I. PROBLEM DEFINITION:

Retention Rates Aspect: We could serve many faculty, Billings and the State of Montana if we could help MSU-Billings increase enrollment and retention within Upper Division courses. We must document that statement with numbers. The goal would be to suggest why science/math/engineering are well-served by having complete majors within the MSU-B campus.

Assessment Aspect: MSU-Billings students -- even those who are "traditional" -- come with confidence problems. They need serious support from faculty. My previous experience documents how much support that initially requires. Assessment can handle two issues that face students with an academic profile typical of MSU-Billings. II continues this topic.

II. SEEING ASSESSMENT IN CURRICULAR TERMS:

To justify the effort to granting agencies and the university, we should use assessment that can monitor the value-added to our students. If a student has an SAT score of 495 in mathematics, it is a job well-done to get them through 1st year calculus. For students under 550 on mathematics SATs it is a challenge to get them through the first semester of several variable calculus.

I comment on several variable calculus, a misunderstood subject. This is a sophomore course at most schools. Here, however, it is not often taught. Further, when it is, it is not typically a sophomore course. Forming an aptitude for math and science requires three dimensional thinking; even when the topic is about areas on a sheet of paper. Reason: Functions (inputs versus outputs) is the data tracking mechanism in math/science. Any output dependent on more than one input puts you at "three – or more – dimensions." That is exactly the topic of several variable calculus.

Christy mentioned her niece's experience with "weather." Weather people are example heavy users of several variable calculus.

III. USE OF TECHNOLOGY AND HOW IT SERVES EDUCATION GOALS:

Our meeting yesterday affirmed this group's comfort with using technology. We would elaborate on the use of such tools as Hyperstudio and Unix. The elaboration would show how they us the programming environment to carry out our assessment and monitoring strategies.

Hyperstudio is an excellent example of a proto-typing tool. Unix provides "easy" programming languages (shell and pearl) that can help our small group accomplish much. Once we get going I would like to show you what I mean. It does not mean that people who use these things will have to learn to program. They would use the programs by getting an e-mail sending them to a URL which would have them click on things to run already written programs.

To demonstrate the potential of programming, for us in running an assessment operation, I often start by showing how e-mail interactions between faculty and students become student "portfolios of interaction." People talk e-mail but there are many bottlenecks to using it well.

f you have intense interactions with 20 (or as I often have had, with 85) students, you go crazy without technology. I won't explain further here. Yet, that is a major topic, for understanding that allows getting started with assessment very quickly.

Assessment tools such as WebWorks (mastery learning) and I(nteractive)Q(uestionnaire)s (IQs: reading, analysis and step thinking) combine -- with some programming -- to create automatic reports that monitor the value-added to such students in most curricular areas.

These same assessment tools also provide a "scaffold" of support to encourage students to trust their academic environment will not fail them. Such support will help them reach new heights, as my paper on IQs posted on my web site notes. Taking students from mastery learning to Step Thinking is really the big issue. It is what makes the biggest difference between humanities and science.

We live in an age of "knowledge explosion." That gives people the feeling that only the latest data counts. That you must learn more now than you ever did before. The result of this has two negatives, and they don't compute to a positive.

  1.  "Facts," rather than understanding the relation between facts, ends up dominating peoples' memories.
  2.  There is an undercurrent message that it's all somewhat hopeless anyway. All you ever hear about is the latest information, and you can never have confidence in what we learned from "the past."

Assessment tools like IQs show how wrong is #2. The skills hidden in science and math haven't been usurped by a long shot. Further, such assessment tools reinforce changes in learning that quickly counter #1. They do that – especially IQs – by dropping the amount of memorization required to understand complicated processes.

IV. SOME PHRASES FROM OUR DISCUSSION:

We would expect a grant proposal would comment substantively on all of these.


V. OUR NEXT STEPS AND CAMPUS SUPPORT:

At the Dean level we affirmed going to Tasneem Kahleel and Mary Susan Fishbaugh. Mark suggested having other people become aware of our efforts, for their support and (dare we hope) contributing actions. These included: Stuart Snider, Jim Baron and Mike Havens. We expect Mike Barber might take to anything that gets off the ground. Here quickly, then are three beginning steps.

  1. Work this present message into something expressing our common feelings of what we might try to accomplish.
  2. Explore with Dave McGinniss, and then granting agencies, like NSF and Sloan, possible projects. We expect these to also satisfy our personal needs to be doing something we believe in. Sloan tends to have interest in innovative projects. NSF has a reputation that it cares more about large coalitions, something we will (at least initially) find it difficult to put together.
  3. Tell people on campus -- to garner their support -- once we have identified a proposal, and what it will take for us to put together something using our collaboration.

For item #c, we need to feel the campus will care. We also need to check territory issues, nipping in the bud anyone's concern for our usurping their domain. In our meeting I did suggest -- with some humor intended -- we be prepared to do short skits for Tasneem and Mary Susan on what we are about.