Institutional Student Learning Outcomes

Institutional Student Learning Outcomes Assessment Summary (AY 2013-2014)

Institutional Student Learning Outcomes (ISLOs)

At the completion of the Institutional Student Learning Outcomes, the student will be able to:

1. Effective oral communication: Capacity to deliver prepared, purposeful presentations designed to increase knowledge, to foster understanding, or to promote change in the listeners’ attitudes, values, beliefs, or behaviors.
2. Effective written communication: Development and expression of ideas in writing through work in many genres and styles, utilizing different writing technologies, and mixing texts, data, and images through iterative experiences across the curriculum.
3. Critical thinking: A habit of mind characterized by the comprehensive exploration of issues, ideas, artifacts, and events before accepting or formulating an opinion or conclusion.
4. Problem solving: Capacity to design, evaluate, and implement a strategy to answer an open-ended question or achieve a desired goal.
5. Intercultural knowledge and competence: A set of cognitive, affective, and behavioral skills and characteristics that support effective and appropriate interaction in a variety of cultural contexts.
6. Information literacy: The ability to know when there is a need for information, to be able to identify, locate, evaluate, and effectively and responsibly use and share that information for the problem at hand.
7. Foundations and skills for life-long learning: Purposeful learning activity, undertaken on an ongoing basis with the aim of improving knowledge, skills, and competence.
8. Quantitative reasoning: Ability to reason and solve quantitative problems from a wide array of authentic contexts and everyday life situations; comprehends and can create sophisticated arguments supported by quantitative evidence and can clearly communicate those arguments in a variety of formats.

ISLO Assessment Report Summary
Previous ISLO report can be viewed at this link:

http://www.comfsm.fm/?q=islo-2012-2014

wiki.comfsm.fm/Academic_Programs/Institutional_Level_Student_Learning_Outcomes

The college is currently undergoing a CSLO/ ISLO linkage process. This process will enable the college to identify which ISLOs will be assessed in which courses.

What we looked at:

For Academic Year 2013-2014 the college assessed effective oral communication using the AAC&U Value Rubric. A total of 156 students were assessed from twelve selected courses from eight programs at the college. Each course identified an oral communication activity/ assignment and assessed the student’s performance using the value rubric. These activities/ assignments ranged from argumentative speeches, informative speeches, and PowerPoint presentations that were relevant to the course/program content.

Oral communication was assessed in the following programs/ courses:

What we found:

Based on the resuts, 95.6% of students were able to prepare and present a purposful presentation that was able to increse knowledge, foster understanding or to promote change in the listeners' attitudes, values, beliefs, or behaviors as rated by the rubric.

Criteria for success for the students at the College of Micronesia-FSM is set at the milestone level of two to three. The reason for this is that the AAC&U VALUE Rubrics were designed for four-year institutions, so a rating of four would be more appropriate for a students graduating from a four-year institution.

The following chart displays the percentage of students who were succesful at each level.

Comparative results between Academic Year 2013-2014 and Academic Year 2012-2013

There was a slight increase in student success from AY 12-13 to AY 13-14.

Criteria for success for the students at the College of Micronesia-FSM is set at the milestone level of two to three. The reason for this is that the AAC&U VALUE Rubrics were designed for four-year institutions, so a rating of four would be more appropriate for a students graduating from a four-year institution.

The bar chart below indicates the average rating for each criterion. It is noted that the overall rating is between 2.6 to 2.9. This rating reaches the minimum criteria for success at the College of Micronesia-FSM. The two highest scoring categories are central message and organization. This indicates that student are able to maintain a central message to their oral presentation and that the presentation are well organized. The use of supporting materials scored the lowest, which may be linked to a weakness in critical thinking skills and research skills. Critical thinking skills will be formally assessed in the Fall 2014

What we are planning to work on:

For Academic Year 2014-2015 a full matrix will be completed to ensure a comprehensive ISLO assessment plan.

The following table shows which ISLOs will be assessed for Academic Year 2014-2015.

Recommendations for students: