STLHE 2015

Increasingly, our campus teaching centre is being asked to account for its impact and make its work more transparent. Having considered many evaluation models, we adapted elements of familiar processes (i.e., Kirkpatrick & Kirkpatrick, 2006; Wright, 2011) to fit our local context. In creating our hybrid comprehensive model of assessment, we also applied curriculum thinking to our situation and harnessed the power of “constructive alignment” (Biggs & Tang, 2011) to help achieve harmony in our approach. Knowing that other centres are facing similar calls for evidence-based decision making in a time of fiscal restraint, we will share our year-long collaborative process for coming up with categories of evidence and an approach to assessment. In so doing, we will provide a framework and tools that others may wish to adapt. First, we will describe our approach and its links to our activities, outcomes, and assessments across all our forms of contact with faculty, staff, postdoctoral fellows, and students (graduate and undergraduate).

Then, we turn to activities designed to scope participants’ own practice, consider the role of intended learning outcomes, and focus on elements of assessment: identifying, gathering, analysing, interpreting, and disseminating evidence. Throughout, the idea that centres’ own programs and consultative work can be understood in terms of constructive alignment will be tested. By the end of the workshop, participants should be able to adapt an approach and associated materials to their own local contexts, leaving with a plan to implement at least one new step in a centre assessment process.