Contact Information
David Higgins
English Instructor
dhiggin@inverhills.edu
651-450-3736
S113
Kathryn Klopfleisch
English Instructor
kklopfleisch@inverhills.edu
651-450-3273
S124
Institutional Assessment
Assessment and Evaluation of Programs, Departments, and College-Wide Learning Outcomes
Overview and Objectives
Inver Hills Community College is committed to continually improving all aspects of the student experience while being accountable to the broader community the college serves. To these ends, the college maintains a faculty-driven and administration-supported assessment and evaluation program with the following objectives:
- Promote and support a culture of assessment and evaluation across the campus.
- Conduct a rigorous and multifaceted assessment and evaluation program.
- Facilitate the use of assessment results for the regular evaluation of all programs and departments with a focus on improving student learning and increasing retention, persistence, and completion.
- Identify, collect, and disseminate resources that can provide a deeper understanding of assessment and evaluation.
Department and Program Review
The department and program review process is designed to define and continually improve the contributions of all departments and programs to student learning. It features:
- Continuous Review. Every department or program is part of a cohort that completes a specific component of the review process each year over a five-year cycle. These components are Student Success, Partnerships, Instructional Strategies, Curriculum, and Planning.
- Meaningful Data. Every fall semester, departments and programs receive assessment data across multiple categories accompanied by an evaluation of their health in each area in function of clearly defined metrics.
- Peer Review. Every spring semester, departments in each cohort share and discuss their reports with one another and offer suggestions for improvement.
- Administrative Support. Departments or programs whose evaluation results indicate health concerns receive extra support from deans in the design and implementation of an action plan.
- Integration. College-wide and program outcomes are integrated into the department and program review model every year.
College-Wide Learning Outcomes
All Inver Hills students will develop personally and intellectually via the following college-wide learning outcomes:
- Critical Thinking: a habit of mind characterized by the comprehensive exploration of issues, ideas, artifacts, and events before accepting or formulating an opinion or conclusion.
- Written Communication: the development and expression of ideas in writing. Written communication involves learning to work in many genres and styles. It can involve working with many different writing technologies, and mixing texts, data, and images. Written communication abilities develop through iterative experiences across the curriculum.
- Creative Thinking: both the capacity to combine or synthesize existing ideas, images, or expertise in original ways and the experience of thinking, reacting, and working in an imaginative way characterized by a high degree of innovation, divergent thinking, and risk taking.
- Mathematical /Logical Reasoning: a "habit of mind," competency, and comfort in working with numerical data. Individuals with strong MR skills possess the ability to reason and solve quantitative problems from a wide array of authentic contexts and everyday life situations. They understand and can create sophisticated arguments supported by quantitative evidence and they can clearly communicate those arguments in a variety of formats (using words, tables, graphs, mathematical equations, etc., as appropriate).
"Why VALUE rubrics?" Learn more.
AY 19-20 College Wide Outcomes Assessment Results
AY 18-19 College Wide Outcomes Assessment Results
AY 16-17 College Wide Outcomes Assessment Results
