Artifact Guidelines

General Education Outcome Artifact Guidelines

The purpose of the following artifact guidelines is to assist faculty in selecting student work that represents our students' level of performance on NMC's General Education Outcomes. These guidelines are also intended to help the Scholarship Action Group (SAG) and the faculty volunteers score the artifacts. The primary impetus for developing these guidelines came from the faculty volunteers who scored student work in May 2005.

Faculty members scoring artifacts identified the need to have some guidelines for receiving scorable artifacts. A few of these comments are listed below.

• "need a better process for getting scoreable assignments"
• "instructors need more instruction on creating scoreable artifacts"
• "to some extent, I found myself disappointed with the assignment"
• "excellent quality overall with a few minority cases where work is needed in assignment construction"
• "I thought some of these [artifacts] were very difficult to grade"

In a combined effort from the SAG and the Educational Services Instructional Management Team (ESIMT), the following artifact guidelines have been established:

Scorable artifacts represent individual student work.

Group artifacts have not worked in the past because scorers are not able to attribute performance on the outcome capabilities to an individual student. It is critical to the process of assessment to have individual student work because the population to which we intend to generalize the results is made up of individual students. It is fine for the overall project to culminate in group work, but unless an individual's work can be singled out and submitted as an artifact, the group artifact cannot be scored.

Scorable artifacts represent student performance on the general education outcome as defined by the capabilities on the scoring rubric.

Assignments that do not ask the student to demonstrate the outcome capabilities provide significant challenges to those scoring the student work. To help facilitate the scoring of the artifacts, it is extremely helpful when the faculty members submitting the artifacts provide a copy of the assignment that generated the work, AND an explanation of how and where the student was expected to demonstrate the outcome capability. If faculty need assistance in creating assignments that result in scorable artifacts, the SAG, Writing Center, and the academic area chairs are prepared to work with them. If after review of the artifacts and assignment, there is still ambiguity as to how the student work is to be scored, the SAG may request guidance from the submitting faculty member.

Scorable artifacts represent student work that is part of the graded work for the course.

The assignment that generates the student work to be scored for general education assessment also generates student work that is graded by faculty members for a student's grade in the course. In this way, the artifacts are considered course-embedded and provide a more authentic assessment of a student's level of achievement. Moreover, course-embedded artifacts ensure that students are motivated to demonstrate their best work.

Scorable artifacts can be scored in a reasonable amount of time and meet the above guidelines.

During the scoring of artifacts experience has shown that each faculty volunteer scores an average of 30 artifacts. Lengthy artifacts (large capstone projects) require an extraordinary amount of time to score. At the same time, artifacts that are too brief do not provide enough evidence with which to evaluate the student's performance on the outcome. To streamline the scoring process, an ideal artifact length is 2-10 pages if written work is submitted.

Scorable artifacts are written and in paper format.

For the time being, artifacts for scoring need to be submitted in hard paper copy. As the process of scoring is refined, the possibility of scoring videos of performances, speeches, etc., will be revisited.