The Office of Assessment collects student work samples from your course’s Essential Assignment(s) to measure student achievement of the Category Specific Learning Outcomes (CSLO) across the university.
Key facts about the Core Education Assessment Process:
- Every Core Education course must have an identified Essential Assignment for each CSLO. The same assignment can be used to assess all or multiple CSLOs.
- Instructors should be sure that the appropriate Core Ed category learning outcomes are linked to their Essential Assignment in Canvas. The Office of Assessment will collect student work from all category-designated courses.
- Instructors with Essential Assignments that are submitted outside of Canvas should contact the Office of Assessment directly.
- Office of Assessment staff will collect, process, and anonymize the student work to make individual student identification difficult or impossible.
- OSU Faculty Assessment Fellows, a group of faculty with expertise in the relevant category, will score the student work using category-specific assessment rubrics. *If you are interested in serving as a Faculty Assessment Fellow please complete the application form
- Category assessment results will be reported at the institutional level—how well OSU students are meeting the Core Ed learning outcomes—no results will be disaggregated for individual courses or programs.
- The results of Core Ed assessment will not be used to certify/decertify any course.
- Assessment results will retain no connection to the students, instructors, or specific courses from which the data were collected.
- Assessment results will be reviewed by the Faculty Senate Core Education Committee, and will eventually be available to the entire OSU community.
What Are Essential Assignments?
Essential assignments:
• Help students make meaning of their work by connecting individual, course, and Core Ed learning goals.
• Prompt students to identify meaningful learning experiences throughout their Core Ed courses, reinforcing what is relevant and useful to transfer to their major courses and beyond.
• Help instructors communicate their learning goals to students and fellow instructors to further engagement around quality teaching and learning.
All Core Education courses will include at least one assignment that directly measures each stated category student learning outcome. These assignments are integral to the course, providing meaningful and authentic assessments of how well students are achieving all required learning outcomes. Each course can use one to three assignments to assess all required outcomes, with seven types of Essential Assignments that can be used for this purpose.
The Seven Essential Assignment Types
A selection of student work, which in their totality, address at least one learning outcome
A speech or talk in which a new product, idea, or piece of work is shown and explained to an audience
A written work of specified length on a topic, in one of several forms, e.g., research paper, position paper, essay, article, story, poem, script, libretto, lab report, etc.
A planned undertaking, usually in the form of a response to a task or problem engaged in by students
A written statement arising from serious thought or consideration given to the examination and/or exploration of how the writer has changed, developed, or grown from experience or interaction with some subject matter, idea, or purpose
Usually scored using an interval scale that provides a number of points earned as the measure of achievement
A literary (e.g., story, poem, play, libretto, essay, critique), artistic work (music, dance, drama, visual art, media), or practical skill (scientific lab) presented or exhibited to the public on stage, screen, or in a physical or digital space
Requirements for Creating Essential Assignments
The specific assignment instructions and details can be different across sections, but all sections use the same type of assignment.
- The essential assignment is a major form of assessment for the learning outcome.
- It counts toward the final course grade.
- All students are required to complete the assignment.
- It is a culminating assessment, conducted after the learning outcome has been taught (and not a pre-test or early formative assignment).
- Completed student work for the essential assignment is a single submission for the overall assessment of the category.
- The essential assignment doesn’t have to be the only assignment in the course that assesses the learning outcome, but it’s the only assignment that will be submitted for category assessment.
What Do Faculty Need to Do?
All courses with a Core Education category designation must participate in assessment or be removed from the category. Linking the Core Ed outcomes to your Essential Assignment(s) lets the Assessment team know where to find samples of student work to be used for Core Education category assessment.
You will need to add the appropriate Category-Specific Learning Outcomes to your course and link these outcomes to your Essential Assignment(s). You may designate a single Essential Assignment to assess all of the CSLOs or use a different Essential Assignment for each CSLO.
- Create your Essential Assignment in Canvas
- Add the appropriate Core Education category outcomes to your course
- Create a rubric and add the appropriate CSLOs to your rubric (or edit your existing Essential Assignment rubric)
- Add the rubric to your Essential Assignment (you do not need to use the rubric for grading)
Steps to Link CSLOs to an Essential Assignment
* If you need support linking the CSLOs to your Essential Assignment in Canvas, please reach out to [email protected]. OSU Canvas Support provides tech support for Core Ed faculty and will make sure the Core Ed outcomes are linked to your assignment without impacting your grading process.
Step-by-step instructions:
If you do not intend to use a rubric for grading your Essential Assignment in Canvas, you may follow these step-by-step instructions: Linking CSLOs to EA
If you already have a rubric that you will use for grading your EA, follow these instructions: Linking CSLOs to EA in Existing Rubric
• Be sure that each CSLO for your category is attached to an Essential Assignment.
• Each CSLO should be used only once, whether you attach all of them to the same Essential Assignment or attach each of them to a different EA.
• If you need tech support with this process, please reach out to the OSU Canvas Support Team at [email protected].
• For questions about the Core Education category assessment process, contact Nancy Barbour at [email protected]