Discoveries around Assessment

In my current work, I see three main areas where assessment/evaluation is used. These include community needs assessments, diagnostic assessments used to inform participants of their own baseline and to be used as a tool within a program, and post program evaluations used as summative assessment. Most of these assessments use technology in some way. 

I decided to use my time this week to simply explore assessment and evaluation further, increasing my knowledge and potentially finding resources to share with my team. 

In my initial search, I realized that there is a whole category of Universal Design for Assessment that I was not familiar with. I spent a bit of time exploring this direction. This article, from Edutopia, provided a basic overview and some easily applicable examples and reasons to consider Universal Design when creating assessments. This document, from CAST provides useful tips on UDL for assessment. 

As a program coordinator, I am not the practitioner working with a community on the front end, so I have not been involved in creating or using community needs assessments. However, I have begun to work more closely with the Welcoming and Inclusive Community programs, which uses a community assessment tool. I found this Pressbook chapter and have marked it for further reading, as it looks like a good overview on the concepts and processes around community needs assessments.  

I appreciated the Barkdale resource’s suggestion of using menus as a way to provide choices.  While the information was not geared towards adult learners, where the learner isn’t earning a grade or completing a course towards a degree or certificate, I think this method is even more useful, as the learner can choose an assessment method that provides the most self reflection and best leads to the individual’s further learning. One little resource I found that may be useful in a Welcoming and Inclusive Community program “menu” is this short DEI quiz, offered by the United Way, a good way to review or highlight vocabulary around DEI. 

Another potentially useful resource in relation to the diagnostic assessments we use, is this site, which offers reviews of Emotional Intelligence assessments. (Linked from this HBR article.)  Currently, our department offers the EQ-i assessment, but information around assessments is nice.