YUKIKO WATANABE, PhD

Need to clarify the intended outcome or impact for your course, program, or service? The workshop provides ample guidance on outcome types, depending on the context of your program and services (e.g., student learning outcomes, healthcare outcomes, etc.)

Why curriculum mapping? Curriculum mapping is a tool to review your curriculum, once your program-level outcomes are set. It is a way to ensure that learning opportunities are incrementally built on one another, so that students can achieve the program-level outcomes. Curriculum mapping process will also unveil various assumptions and beliefs on teaching and learning, when the process is inclusive and collaborative. Want to know more about curriculum mapping and how it can help program design and outcomes assessment work? 

To be accountable and to improve most educational programs need to  asked to engage in developing and assessing student learning outcomes and utilizing assessment findings for program improvement. This hands-on workshop will take you through ways to design assessment that is useful, meaningful, relevant, and feasible to the local context. Participants will leave the workshop with an assessment plan for their own program.

Utilization-focused program evaluation (Patton, 1997, 2008) is an evaluation approach that maximizes utility of evaluation findings by the intended users of evaluation. Intended use of evaluation informs the designing, prioritization, and implementation of evaluation. The workshop will introduce you the principles and practical steps of utilization-focused evaluation. Participants will be engaged in various tasks that will clarify their evaluation purposes, intended uses, and evaluation designs. 

To be announced.

Focus group is one of the commonly used qualitative research methods for program evaluation. It is a moderated discussion focused on a specific topic to gain understanding of participants’ collective perception of that topic. It can be used for various evaluation purposes, including gaining insight into group perception of learning; eliciting group attitude towards curriculum; identifying and understanding needs and expectations of program/project stakeholders. The workshop will take you through planning, designing, and facilitating focus groups and analyzing and interpreting focus group data. Participants will create their own evaluation plan using focus group. 

Why is it important for your faculty to understand students’ L2 speaking outcomes and students’ experiences with L2 speaking instruction? What kinds of programmatic decisions do your faculty intend to make on the basis of the evidence gathered? In order to ensure meaningfulness and usefulness of speaking outcomes assessment, these are the questions to consider first before deciding assessment methods and instruments. This workshop will walk you through a useful approach to speaking outcomes assessment that is guided by the principle of "intended use by intended users." Using case scenarios, participants will learn various practices of speaking outcomes assessment in college foreign language programs and caveats for assessing speaking outcomes (e.g., criteria setting, scoring, reporting, etc.).