Assessment

Unlike any other course management system, Mentor was built from the ground up to integrate assessment methods into the fabric of the teaching and learning process.

  • Curriculum Mapping – Mentor supports an unlimited number of sets of student learning outcomes. Each curricular program may define its own set of outcomes and map these outcomes to any set of courses in Mentor. Mapping outcomes can be as easy as specifying a school or a department, or outcomes can be mapped to specific courses across departments and schools. The same course can have several sets of outcomes from different curricular programs, as often happens when courses are interdisciplinary.

    Additionally, Mentor supports course outcomes and linking them to the curricular program outcomes. The program can also define rubric traits for either the program level or the course level outcomes and these rubric traits are automatically available to the course instructor to use when creating rubrics.

    Mentor also supports an empirical approach to curriculum mapping. Mentor can produce maps of all the courses that have assignments linked to any given learning outcome. This provides a program with a clear picture of where faculty are actually addressing the outcomes and how often (how many assignments) these outcomes are being addressed.

    Finally, Mentor provides instructors of courses with an easy interface to link test questions to learning outcomes, providing the instructor with an instance assessment summary on these outcomes based on the students’ scores on the questions.

  • Program Assessment – The links of assignments to program learning outcomes is the basis for an assessment committee to sample student work and apply program defined rubrics. Mentor offers a number of sampling methodologies, including random sampling of student files from assignments linked to learning outcomes. This random sampling system can be tuned to specific terms, subjects, course levels, assignment types and even file types. Selected files can be “removed” and new ones sampled in their place. Mentor also provides a method to specify specific cohorts of students and then select specific assignments to populate the list of artifacts (files) to be evaluated.The Mentor program assessment module provides an assessment committee with a list of files and links to their assignments, and a rubric that is defined by the committee. There is a norming report that compares individual assessor’s scores on each artifact, and when the scoring has been completed, Mentor instantly generates a report that display a chart of average rubric trait scores, and a table of a trait by trait distribution of scores, including average, standard deviation and inter-rater reliability (percent agreement).
  • Leveraging Faculty Grading Rubrics for Program Assessment – When a program defines rubric traits for its outcomes or for course level outcomes, Mentor can also aggregate the instructors’ scores across many assignments and courses to generate program level outcomes reports. Mentor can also aggregate rubric scores for individual students to generate a student outcomes transcript.
  • Student Assessment – In addition to artifact assessment, Mentor provides a method for assessing students individually: their knowledge, skills or dispositions. Whatever characteristics you define and can measure, you can create a rubric and apply that to the case of individual students.
  • Outcomes Based Report Cards – Finally, Mentor has a sophisticated “report card” system that allows instructors or program administrators to set up a report card, include specific evaluative scales as well as prompt the instructor to evaluate student progress on learning outcomes.