SLO Implementation Update

STEPS TAKEN:
I have contacted 7 chemistry faculty and department chairs inquiring about their SLO implementation process.  I also perused at least 10 College websites as a source for SLO Implementation Process.

OUTCOMES and DOCUMENTATION:
1) Only 3 of the 7 faculty replied and of the 10 college websites, only 1 had substantial information from which I can glean answers to the questions I posed.  A summary of the responses and website information a sample copy of the e-mailed questions are included in the appendix.

2) Based on what I learned from these investigations, I came up with a plan for our Program to help us carry out the implementation in the most meaningful, efficient, transparent, collaborative, and timely manner.  A copy of the document that I shared with my Mike Ansell and Richard Grow summarizing what I learned and how we can implement it for our discipline is given in the appendix.

3) My work on this further inspired me to work with other chemistry faculty in ensuring that our SLO’s are recent, meaningful, consistent, and easy to implement.   I have worked with some adjunct faculty on developing new SLO’s and analyzing and entering SLO data to make it easier for them to participate in the process.  In the past several years, there have been many missteps in terms of coming up with relevant SLO’s whose assessments are meaningfully telling not just for our own self-evaluation but also for Program evaluation.  Data analysis was complicated by changing rubric scales, changing exams for assessment, and small number statistics which have disallowed us from completing a full cycle of assessment and improvement implementation.  We began with very simple SLO’s that soon became apparently trivial and we are now in the process of moving all courses to have SLO’s more comprehensively assessed by the American Chemical Society National Exams.  Four of our seven courses currently use this (31, 1A, 1B, and 12B).  We are looking into reviewing the ACS Exams for the 30A and 30B content to see if they would be appropriate.  Because of less uniformity in introductory chemistry courses as far as content coverage, these exams may not necessarily be the best approach.  In the meantime, we have created a new SLO for both 30A and 30B as the data show that the previous ones have been well-covered and have had successful SLO evaluations in the past several years.  I had dialogues with Mike Ansell on ways to make the whole process more quickly evolve into one where there is enough consistent data to analyze so we can focus on closing the loop.  We agreed that the first step is to streamline and simplify the assessment process and the data entry and analysis.  At the inspiration of Mike Ansell, we created a simple Excel spread sheet that we can send to instructors to fill-in with the most pertinent data.