Faculty in Action: Researching a Community of Practice Approach to Institutional Learning Outcomes Assessment
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Increasingly, postsecondary education institutions are articulating institutional learning outcomes that define core competencies and evidence student learning to justify their value; however, concerns have arisen due to lack of authenticity, faculty autonomy, and representation of diverse disciplinary perspectives and worldviews (Lucas in Policy and Society 33(3):215–224, 2014). To actively engage faculty in co-designing institutional rubrics and learning outcomes assessment, we designed an action research project with the goal of examining and improving assessment practices related to institutional learning outcomes. The project is now in its fourth action research cycle; this paper describes the first two years of trialing a faculty-led community of practice approach to course-embedded assessment we call Strategic Assessment of Institutional Learning. We further describe the landscape of institutional learning outcomes assessment, two iterative cycles of action research, and seven themes that surfaced during the project. These seven themes informed the direction of learning outcomes assessment at our university: 1) student informed consent, 2) trust and community, 3) assignment selection, 4) rubric clarity and disciplinary variation, 5) framing the degree of student achievement, 6) implications for course redesign, and 7) faculty motivation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.054 | 0.047 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it