Assessing Community Engaged Courses
- support your students' learning and development.
- support you to improve your course and the community engagement project.
- create accountability for meeting community partner objectives.
- contribute to the development of new knowledge about Community Engaged Pedagogy.
Formative Assessment
Formative assessment is ongoing throughout the semester/project. These assessments are meant to help you understand where you are in the learning/project process so that you can make any needed adjustments to improve your outcomes. Formative assessments are meant to relatively quick, require a small investment of time and energy, and be relatively low stakes. Reflection papers, exercises, discussions, etc. are often used as formative assessments.Student Learning formative assessments:
Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs) can be used to assess what students are learning from their community engagement project, and how they are connecting academic content with their community engagement.Community Engaged Project formative assessment
Just as you check-in regularly with your students about how their learning is developing, you should also be intentional about creating check-ins with your community partner to learn how the project is developing. Following are some things you might check in with your partner about throughout the course.- Communication with your community partner
- Are students communicating appropriately (tone and frequency) with community partner and their constituents?
- Are communications between faculty member and community partner frequent enough? In the right form (meeting, phone, email, text, etc.)? Addressing the right topics?
- Should faculty and community partners communicate together with students, or is it enough for faculty member to be communicating with students, the community partner to be communicating with students, and the faculty member and community partner to be communicating?
- Students’ preparation. Have students been adequately prepared to be successful in their work on the community engaged project? Are there things they need to learn that you did not initially anticipate?
- Is there training or support that the community partner or their staff needs to fully participate (e.g. training on a particular software being used for the project)?
- Timely progress on community engaged project. If the project is proceeding more slowly than expected, are the adjustments that need to be made? If so, make sure to collaboratively plan these adjustments with our partner.
- Quality of the work being done for the community engaged project. If the quality is not up to a reasonable standard, what changes could be made? If the quality is high, what has contributed to that?
- Unanticipated benefits or challenges.
Summative Assessment
Summative assessments are used to evaluate whether course learning/project outcomes have been achieved. These assessments are done at the end, or/and after the completion, of the course and/or project. Summative assessments are typically more effortful and take more time that formative assessments and are higher stakes.Students' learning may be assessed through assignments in your course. Examples include final papers, their final product for the community engaged project, or on a final exam. These assessments contribute to a student’s grade for the course.
After the completion of the project, you can assess student development through non-graded means (e.g. course evaluations, surveys, focus groups, interviews etc.), and don’t forget to measure community impact as well.
Read
- Assessing Service-Learning and Civic Engagement: Principles and Techniques (2nd Ed), (Wash U electronic resource) Chapter 3 “Student Impact” and Chapter 5 “Community Impact”
- Sam Fox Blue Pages Guide on Project and Program Evaluation
- Other Assessments to consider: