City College of San Francisco - California Competes

THEME II
The Program Review framework is a very significant step toward the development of an institutional
response to the new accreditation standards on student learning outcomes. However, the framework presents
outcomes assessment as an option for departments, and the Standard II Report concludes that there
is still considerable work to be done before the College has a fully implemented process for the assessment
and evaluation of SLOs. This essay has already discussed a number of areas in which assessment is playing
a crucial role in the improvement of College programs and services. Moreover, faculty in all departments
and academic programs assess student learning in their courses using a variety of methods, even if they
do not describe it as the “assessment of student learning outcomes.” Faculty in many departments and
programs rigorously conduct assessments of student learning outcomes to improve program effectiveness.
For example, faculty in the allied health programs and a number of other vocational training programs
that use licensure criteria or other forms of external assessment have incorporated the use of these assessments
as a basis for revising curriculum and improving instructional methodologies. There are also
selected examples of individual departments that have developed common assessment instruments not
only to determine individual student progress but also to assess the effectiveness of courses and programs
in producing student learning outcomes. For example, the noncredit ESL program has used “promotion
examinations” for many years to assess the overall outcomes produced by its course sequence and the
evaluation of program effectiveness. The credit ESL program is in the process of developing a similar
model to assess the effectiveness of a major curriculum overhaul completed three years ago. However, the
Standard II Report points out the need to develop a more comprehensive institution-wide response to the
use of assessment as a central component of determining effectiveness at the course, program, and institutional
levels, a challenge that may prove to be more difficult in the academic than vocational fields.
The two case studies that follow provide insight into the benefits and challenges that this institution-wide
effort is likely to produce. These two case studies are not intended to serve as models for all departments
nor are they necessarily representative of all assessment efforts across the College. They were chosen as
select examples of significant, well-documented work in a department and a division that reflect a concentrated
effort. The first describes an effort to determine what students were learning in a pivotal course
in the reading and writing skills sequence. The second traces the efforts of the leadership of the Student
Development Division to lay the groundwork for an initiative to fully address the establishment of the
student learning outcomes paradigm across all of the units within the Division. These two case studies
suggest how focusing on student learning outcomes can improve student success at City College.
III. Case Studies
The English Common Exam and an Evolving Culture of Assessment. Late in the Fall 2004 semester,
City College of San Francisco was selected as one of 11 California community colleges to participate in a
new initiative sponsored by The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and The William
and Flora Hewlett Foundation, “Strengthening Pre-Collegiate Education in Community Colleges” (SPECC),
a project that focuses on improving pre-collegiate basic skills instruction. 5 At a retreat for the participating
colleges in February 2004, each college presented an overview of its student demographics and the major
basic skills initiatives that brought the college to the SPECC project. Many of the colleges had discovered
the fallacy of using pass rates for basic skills courses as the only measure of success since institutional
research showed that large portions of students passing one class ended up failing the subsequent course.
As a result, each campus, in its own way, had attempted to assess more accurately what the student had
learned in the prerequisite class and what the student needed to learn to succeed in the subsequent class,
thus embracing the core distinguishing characteristics of the student learning outcomes paradigm.
5 “Carnegie and Hewlett Partner in Program to Strengthen Pre-Collegiate Education,” Press Release: The Carnegie Foundation
for the Advancement of Teaching, January 2005.
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