According to the authors, to infuse equity truly in assessment requires that students be actively involved in the process of assessing their own learning. Equitable assessment argues that students can demonstrate attainment of learning outcomes in many ways, and in any particular instance of assessment, students can be offered multiple ways to…

Institutions of higher education are expected by accrediting agencies to perform systematic monitoring of student learning and evaluate the effectiveness of programs of study and institutional operations to identify what needs improvement and then enact planned change to improve the institution; however, many struggle to make this connection. This…

This chapter addresses key assessment issues that influence the success of assessment programs at community colleges. Suggestions for advancing general education assessment are included.

LaGuardia Community College in Queens, New York is known for its leadership in assessment practices aimed at improving teaching and learning. Its practices to improve student outcomes include remedial math and composition pathways reforms and establishing signature general education core competencies and communication abilities. Combined together,…

Higher education institutions across the country have examined equity in education outcomes through disaggregating student demographic data. However, it is not as common for academic institutions to also examine student learning outcomes for inequities in student learning. The current study explores what the greatest contributors are for the lack…

This chapter introduces the Borough of Manhattan Community College's Institutional Effectiveness Assessment Plan and the Shults Dorimé-Williams Taxonomy as resources for the enhancement of assessment within administrative, educational, and student support units.

Purpose: Unless higher education institutions ensure that first-rate academic programme offerings are supported with the provision of high-quality services, student satisfaction, retention, enrolment and ultimately, viability of the institutions will be adversely affected (Canic and McCarthy, 2000). The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the…

The purpose of this study is to provide insight into strategies that promote a practice of evaluation in community colleges. This study focuses on the aspects of organizational culture including employee engagement, leadership participation, evaluation practices, values and expectations, organizational norms, and benefit and incentive system…

This article describes a faculty-led project to assess and revise institutional student learning outcomes at a small urban community college. The revision process involved four stages: (1) exploring stakeholders' explicit and implicit understandings through an experimental assessment; (2) using statistical tools to identify redundancies and…

Open educational resources (OERs) are an alternative textbook to publisher materials used by colleges and universities. OER materials have a cost advantage for students; many are published as free or cost-reduced textbooks for students. The authors developed and piloted an OER textbook for Business Law I in the Management program of the School of…

Community colleges are tasked with juggling multiple missions. They provide open access to education for adults in their community, work with industry partners to educate the local workforce, and provide relevant programming to the communities they serve. When compared with students at four-year institutions, community college students are older,…

This chapter will demonstrate how Achieving the Dream, a nonprofit leader of a national reform network of community colleges and open-access universities, uses assessment to guide institutions toward a culture of evidence, equity and continuous improvement to improve student success.

This phenomenological study examined the lived experience of community college faculty champions of learning outcomes assessment. This study sought to elucidate the experiences of faculty champions of assessment by exploring both what the participants experienced as well as how they experienced their roles in leading assessment work on their…

For 25 years, nearly 3,000 colleges and universities have used the Ruffalo Noel Levitz (RNL) Satisfaction-Priorities Surveys to assess their students, strengthen the student experience, increase student success and completion, and prioritize campus planning initiatives. The surveys are valued so highly because they reveal where institutions are…

The Public School Forum's Top Education Issues outlines the Forum's priorities on what should be at the forefront of education policy decision-making each legislative biennium, as the Forum works toward eliminating the systemic racism and inequities that exist and are visible throughout the educational system. The Top Education Issues publications…