Workshop - Rubrics to Evaluate Social Responsibility

What is social responsibility and what instruments we can use to evaluate it? These questions where the main topics discussed during the workshop presented by Dr. Isaura Alvarado of the Graduate School of the Education College on Wednesday April 29th called "Rubrics to Evaluate Social Responsibility" offered by Office of Evaluation of Student Learning and the Center for Academic Excellence.

Click here to access the presentation.

Once again, thanks for your assistance and continued commitment to improve student learning in our campus.

GRE Workshop

Our commitment to improve not only student learning but also the opportunity that our graduates have to pursue post baccalaureate studies led us to prepare a workshop for the Graduate School entrance exam, the Graduate Record Examination (also known as GRE).

Click here to download the PDF presentation. If you have any comments, please let us know.

Workshop - Writing: Evaluation of text and some of its indicators

Click here to find presentation offered today by Dr. Jorge L. Cruz, PH.D.: "Writing: Evaluation of text and some of its indicators".

Below is his contact information:

Jorge L. Cruz Velázquez, Ph.D.
Graduate Studies Dept.
College of Education
UPR - Río Piedras
j.cruzvelazquez@gmail.com

Forum: The Implementation of the Student Learning Assessment Plans

The first of a series of activities planned for the second semester of the 2008-2009 academic year by the OEAE.

Date: February, 11th 2009

Place: Amphitheater 3, Education College

Hour: 1:00pm - 4:30pm

The purpose of the forum is to present how four different departments and their respective assessment coordinators are implementing the Student Learning Assessment Plan of their academic programs.

Central questions for this discussion:

1) What each assessment coordinator is doing to implement her plan to assess student learning?
2) How each assessment coordinator is implementing her plan to assess student learning?
3) What has been their learning experiences assessing student learning so far?
4) What are their results and their proposed transforming actions?
5) What are some of their projections?
6) Recommendations as to how other departments can implement their Plan: How other programs could use the ideas presented by these coordinators?

Here are the presentations for the forum:

Moderator: Prof. Nadia Cordero, Office of Evaluation of Student Learning

Introducction: Prof. Julio Rodríguez, Office of Evaluation of Student Learning,

Chemistry, Dra. Rosa Flores

Social Work, Dra. Gisela Negrón

Economic Dra. Indira Luciano

Teacher Preparation Program, Dra. Sandra Macksoud

Results of the effective communication skills in Spanish and ELASH II tests

As part of the commitment of the University of Puerto Rico Río Piedras Campus to improve the communication skills of its graduates, two test were administrated on August 7th 2008 to freshmen students: an effective communications skills in Spanish and the English Language System Assessment for Hispanics (ELASH II) tests.

The results of the tests were the following:

University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus*

Schools and their programs:
1. Architecture
2. Communications

Colleges and their programs:
1. Business Administration
2. General Studies
3. Humanities
4. Natural Sciences
5. Social Sciences

*Excludes students from the Education College.

Each assessment coordinator has both the results of their programs as well as the individual results of their students that took the tests.

OEAE's Assessment Cycle

We believe that assessment of student learning is a neverending process to strive to improve teaching practices as well as student learning.

Since communication is pivotal to our Office, we created a cycle to oversee how does each and every College or School and their respective programs develop and implement their Assessment Plans in order to achieve their goals.

Every so often we need an update from the assessment coordinators throughout our Campus in order to:
1) keep up to date their information in our databases.
2) offer help as to how construct rubrics to measure learning objectives.
3) analyze their data if they need assistance.
4) publish their findings.

Thus, in order to maintain our cycle, we need your feedback. Remember, we are here to give to each assessment coordinator a helping hand in this ongoing process.

Assessment Cycle - Adapted form Maki, P. (2001)

The neverending assessment cycle is a way to visualize how does each and every part contributes to achieve a particular goal.

Once we implement a change, we must gather and analyze data to corroborate if indeed the evidence points towards a higher achievement before we continue to work with another goal. If it does not, we must search for other ways to improve it.