Creating one assessment plan for evaluating both your ABET and KEEN Student Outcomes by using already-written performance indicators

Summary: Creating one assessment plan for evaluating both your ABET and KEEN Student Outcomes by using already-written performance indicators makes life much easier!

Curiosity: Many programs are modifying their assessment plans due to recent changes to the ABET Criteria, whereas other programs are creating separate assessment plans for measuring entrepreneurial mindset. Is it possible to create one assessment plan that allows for the evaluation of both ABET and KEEN Student Outcomes? And, can such an assessment plan be developed through use of already-written performance indicators?

Connections: This card provides the methodology used by the computer science program at Ohio Northern University (ONU) to streamline the process of developing one assessment plan for evaluating both sets of outcomes. We started with the ONU EM Expanded KEEN Student Outcomes (eKSOs), that provides over 50 performance indicators, and used the correlation map from the 2019 KEEN NC Workshop on using EML to demonstrate ABET Student Outcomes to identify strong affinities between the eKSOs and the new ABET Student Outcomes. Tools such as the “PreCAR” and the “Course Assessment Matrix” (both described below) are then iteratively used to help better discern where student work artifacts are available within the curriculum and which ones should be used in assessment. The 2020 ASEE Conference paper associated with this card also discusses how a discipline’s Body of Knowledge can be used to easily obtain more performance indicators that can be used for the additional measuring of both the ABET and KEEN Student Outcomes. 

Creating Value: Our program’s assessment plan is provided in both list (without courses) and table (with courses) format, so you can see what was done and how the information is presented. Each performance indicator used in our plan is documented as to where it was sourced: from (1) the eKSOs or (2) our discipline’s “Computer Science Curricula 2013” Body of Knowledge document. If your discipline does not have a similar document, you can still streamline much of your assessment plan development through the application of the performance indictors in the eKSOs, leaving just a handful of discipline-specific indicators for the program to develop on their own. The biggest value that this methodology delivers is through incorporating the EM assessment into the ABET assessment process that our programs already need to perform. Programs that already have a functioning assessment process for their ABET Student Outcomes can use what’s shown here as a guide to easily embed and/or identify EM performance indicators with minimal upheaval. Another source of value is from NOT having to deal with the largest headache usually encountered when developing an assessment plan: crafting performance indicators from scratch. Creating our new assessment plan was actually fun to work on!

Overview of Process:
- Select set of performance indicators from ONU eKSOs for ABET Student Outcomes
- Select additional performance indicators from discipline's Body of Knowledge (or write your own)
- Create initial assessment plan, identifying possible courses for collecting assessment data
- Faculty use PreCAR sheets to identify assessment artifacts within their courses
- Coordinator uses PreCAR input to populate Course Assessment Matrix (CAM) sheet
- Coordinator uses CAM sheet to distribute assessment workload
- Review choices and iterate until a steady state is reached and ABET plan is finalized
- Create EM plan by starting with selected ONU eKSOs
- Augment EM plan by aligning the additional performance indicators to the EM Student Outcomes