Dr. Natasha Jankowski is a higher education and assessment expert and the former Executive Director of the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA). She is co-author of the books Using Evidence of Student Learning to Improve Higher Education; the book Degrees that Matter: Moving Higher Education to a Learning Systems Paradigm, and the […]
Archive | April, 2022
Combatting a Compliance Mindset by Advocating for Betterment
While accreditation work consists of adherence to standards and criteria, too often efforts are reduced to simply a compliance mindset to satisfy accreditors (Ewell, 2009; Gaston, 2018; Levy et al., 2018). To combat a compliance mindset with accreditation work, this article encourages a betterment approach to promote continuous improvement rather than focusing solely on meeting […]
End of Course Reflections and Changes Informed by Assessment During the Covid-19 Pandemic
Most educational practices continued during the academic year 2020-2021 despite the restrictions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. While faculty certainly had to pivot and replace in-person modality with a virtual reality, this switch to virtual did not fully define the educational improvement at the course level at Georgian Court University (GCU). This statement is collaborated […]
The Potential and Pitfalls of Net Promoter Scores (NPS) as a “Business World” Metric in Academic Assessment
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) was introduced in 2003 and has since been embraced by a vast majority of major companies worldwide. However, higher education has been slower to adopt this simple metric, in part because students aren’t exactly customers. Although they can choose among the many educational institutions and resources that are available just […]
Assessing the Implementation of Changes to Teaching
To satisfy various stakeholders, including their institution’s administrators, faculty assess the effectiveness of their teaching (Haras, et. al, 2017). End-of-course student evaluations are still the most widely used method to assess teaching (Lawrence, 2018). Increasingly, however, research evidence shows that student bias, such as expected grade, gender, age, race, and attractiveness of the teacher all […]
Creating Equity: Scaffolding First-Year Composition At A Hispanic-Serving Institution
Knowing that First-Year Composition (FYC) is closely tied to student success at our Hispanic-serving institution, we conducted a pilot study to see how redesigning our FYC courses with scaffolded reading and writing instruction might impact pass rates and retention of our Latinx students. The results of this study clearly demonstrated that a scaffolded course design […]
