EDU 653: Assessment Strategies to Improve Adult Learning

Overview

This course is designed to provide learners with needed skills for the development of assessment plans to measure learning in adult learning and training environments. Students will be able to assess different kinds of learning outcomes. The techniques and principles learned and practiced in this course apply to learning in a wide variety of situations – both institutional and corporate settings. Implicit in this overall goal is a thorough understanding of learning objectives and outcomes and their classifications plus an ability to write an organizational or educational program assessment plan. The assessments and objectives, in turn, provide essential and ongoing feedback to the students and their organizations as they progress through the course modules which culminate in an organizational assessment plan of the learner’s own design. The student’s course activities will be centered around developing a learning assessment plan for a specific organization and with specific learning objectives.

Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

• For any learning outcome, be able to write a complete instructional objective that describes that outcome and its required performance, prerequisite skills or prior knowledge and potential assessment tools to assess the outcome.
• For any complex performance (e.g. behavior changes or portfolios), develop performance criteria checklists and rubrics for assessing that performance.
• Apply both formative and summative assessment to achieve objectives.
• Design assessments based on well written objectives that contain appropriate performance, criterion and conditions.
• Develop ways to design learning events and assess that critical thinking has occurred.
• Differentiate assessments that would be appropriate to measure experience, performance or behavior.
• Select the most appropriate assessments for educational or workplace settings from a variety of assessment tools.
• Develop an appropriate assessment plan for a specific organization and its learning objectives.

Required Texts
EDU 653 texts are available from the JIU/MBS bookstore