Dr. Lee Nickoson's Work on Assessing Student Writing Published

Dr. Lee Nickoson, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of English, recently participated in the Reinvention Collaborative, and had a co-authored paper published in RC20/20. RC20/20 is a digital, open-access publication featuring papers presented at a national biennial conference on innovation at research universities.

Dr. Nickoson, Dr. Julia M. Matuga (Vice Provost, Institutional Effectiveness), and Dr. Jessica M. Turos (Associate Director, Academic Assessment) presented their work at the conference. Their poster and paper, "Integrated and Intentional Institutional Infrastructures to Support the Assessment of Undergraduate Writing: How Data Fuel This Process" can be viewed on the RC20/20 website.

Their abstract reads:

"This project was part of a larger institutional initiative to establish an all-in-one assessment system. Bowling Green State University’s (BGSU) centralized, all-in-one assessment system uses a continuous improvement model for the assessment of student learning. This manuscript documents the creation and use of course and program learning outcomes in an undergraduate writing program and what occurred during the refinement of those program learning outcomes. BGSU recently explored refining the alignment of University learning outcomes to general education learning outcomes to writing program learning outcomes (i.e., vertical alignment). The institution also expanded the use of external, direct and indirect assessments on writing, such as the Collegiate Learning Assessment Plus (CLA+) and the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and to explore institutional learning outcomes (i.e., horizontal alignment). This manuscript further discusses the collaboration between the University and the program to explore how students were performing on institutional and programmatic writing assessments. Implications for the academic, administrative, and technical infrastructure are examined. Finally, a review of the complex conversations about data and external benchmarking is provided."