CLO Rollup to PLO Example

Download CLO Rollup to PLO Example.docx

Download Automated PLO Assessment.xlsx

Assessment Project OPTION #2:

Project title: Using McGraw-Hill Category Analysis to Perform PLO Assessment

Author & other members:  Matthew Mburu

Date:  August 31, 2017

 

Related Outcomes: This project focused on assessing any PLO using existing CLO data collected by publisher based LMS (in this case, McGraw-Hill Connect). The process may be adapted to work for any publisher-provided LMS using the reports generated thereof.

Goal: The goal of this project is to avoid the need to recreate a special (or additional) project when assessing PLOs, but rather, to rely on assessments that students have already completed in class to inform the achievement of PLOs.

Process:

For faculty who use McGraw-Hill Connect (and associated products) the following are simplified steps to access and analyze PLOs from CLOs.

  1. Using excel or any other spreadsheet software of your choice, download and align your LMS / textbook learning objectives with the TCC approved course level outcomes. This ensures that the learning objectives from chapter to chapter or unit to unit are first aggregated into usable CLO data.
  2. On the same spreadsheet, use your syllabus (or Curricunet) to align (tag) the CLOs to the PLOs. Since not all CLOs pertain to each PLO, this step is necessary to ensure that the for each PLO, only the associated CLOs are used.
  3. On McGraw-Hill Connect, access the “Reports” page and choose “Category Analysis”. Select all the graded assessments that have been completed in the course. Under category, select “Learning Objective” so that the report is reported using categorized using the LMS’s learning objectives.

Alternative: If an assessment type analysis is desired, download category analysis reports by assignment type e.g: assignments, quizzes, etc. For a detailed analysis, you may also combine learning objective categories with other criteria such as level of difficultness, Bloom’s, etc.

  1. Copy and Paste the summary category analysis into the spreadsheet (preferably on a different sheet).
  2. Use appropriate formulas (vlookup, index, and Ifs or other formulas as preferred / needed) to consolidate the data into the respective PLOs. That is, for each LMS learning objective, assign the average score to the corresponding CLOs. Secondly, for each CLO, attach the respective score to the pertinent PLOs.

After completing the above five steps, you should have a summary analysis of how all the students in associated sections achieved the respective PLOs.  Using the benchmark score established by the program, identify performance of the resulting PLOs averages against the benchmark score and act accordingly. To make informed evaluation, drill down by expanding the associated LMS learning objectives to identify specific areas that you personally deem need attention (gain areas as well as gap areas).

Results:

The project allows instructors to rely on representative assessments (variety of assignments, quizzes, etc) to assess students’ achievement of PLOs rather than relying on one special project that may not be representative. This allows instructors to use what they are already using in assessing what it is that they believe is the most important in their courses.

Challenges:

The following were the challenges encountered in this project:

  • Not all assessments are completed on McGraw-Hill, and thus, Exams completed in class (about 70% of the grade in accounting classes) were omitted.
  • Most McGraw-Hill assessments are not proctored and thus, the scores may be artificially higher than in class assessments thus significantly overstating the achievement of PLOs.
  • Compiling the data requires considerable use of intermediate and advanced excel formulas to link LMS Los to CLOs and eventually to PLOs which might be intimidating to some users.