What's Assessment Data Telling You About Faculty Curriculum Assessment Skills?

BACKGROUND

Writing challenging assessments is a skill that very few faculty are taught when they are students. Instead, most faculty learn this skill when they start teaching. Many academic institutions conduct faculty-development programs on test development and item writing—typically offered as a daylong or multi-day workshop. There are several problems with this approach. First, these programs are not based on personalized and real curricular assessment data of the program’s faculty. Second, the workshop model approaches faculty as a group in need of remediation, rather than as self-directed expert learners. Finally, faculty engagement is not assured as participants may be present physically but not mentally given how these programs are developed and implemented. These deficiencies can be addressed by engaging faculty in their own self-paced development by providing them with actionable dashboards that contain data from their own curricular assessments and an opportunity to interact with other faculty with whom they can have stimulating discussions of what improvements can be made in their item writing skills.