Chalk & Wire

Champlain College

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The Chalk & Wire staff has been tremendously helpful at the philosophical level of understanding portfolio thinking and how to effectively use portfolios in an assessment system. As we built portfolio structures, learning tasks and rubrics we were always encouraged to refer back to our high level goals and the big questions that we are trying to answer.

Our goals for academic assessment.

Champlain College’s vision for academic assessment is to create a meaningful system of processes that support continuous improvement of courses and curricula, while also building a body of evidence that proves we are achieving our institutional and academic missions. In other words, we do assessment because we value it, not because we have to do it. We strive for assessment practices that are: meaningful, authentic, constructive, formative, approachable, and well designed.

Using assessable portfolios.

Electronic portfolios have given us a way to examine authentic student work in real-time and reveal to learners, teachers and the college how well our learning outcomes are being met. Any solution we implemented needed to be hosted off site and be easy enough to use so that non-technical staff could administer the system. We also needed to work with a company that would be responsive to our unique needs and one that would recognize that we were going to be a power user and deploy to the entire campus over four years. Chalk & Wire was a good fit on all fronts.

Implementing the assessment system.

Our mission was to use the electronic portfolios to study what and how students are learning in our core curriculum and to measure their achievement throughout our college competencies.

• Critical & Creative Thinking
• Ethical Reasoning
• Global Appreciation
• Oral Communication
• Written Communication
• Quantitative Literacy
• Technology & Information Literacy

Each of the 12 required courses in our core curriculum and our college capstone course has identified key assignments that are included in the students’ portfolios and assessed by faculty using rubrics. Individual criteria from the rubrics are then mapped to the desired outcomes of the core curriculum and/or the college competencies. This allows us to get a clear picture of what skill level students entered our programs with and what level of skill they leave with.

It was very important for us to avoid some of the challenges associated with add-on assessment tools, but to instead measure authentic classroom activities. The result is data that is valid and allows us to follow student performance over time to see where curricular and pedagogical changes have resulted in improved student learning.

In addition to the competency assessment portfolios, our co-curricular life skills program (LEAD) has also begun requiring students to complete their sophomore requirements by building a career development portfolio.

How Chalk & Wire has helped us?

The Chalk & Wire staff has been tremendously helpful at the philosophical level of understanding portfolio thinking and how to effectively use portfolios in an assessment system. As we built portfolio structures, learning tasks and rubrics we were always encouraged to refer back to our high level goals and the big questions that we are trying to answer.

Their support staff have been very responsive to urgent help requests and in assisting us to see how to leverage existing tools in new ways. They have guided us through everything from technical minutiae and functional questions to system implementation and data analysis. While there are individuals designated as front line support, we frequently interact with software developers, web programmers, report writers, account executives and the CEO himself.

Benefits of user-lead development.

The other benefit of Chalk & Wire is that product updates are driven by the needs of the user community. Their willingness to solicit and respond to student feedback about usability and functionality has been a real differentiator. During our implementation their CEO came to our campus and listened to student concerns and recommendations. He helped us to address some minor issues that were a result of our implementation decisions and also took the students’ feedback into account when releasing the next version of the software. Our students and faculty have noticed and appreciated the changes. As administrators we were also delighted that the most recent release included reworking a rubric-to-standards mapping process that saved us an enormous amount of time.

So what has this meant for our institution?

The Chalk & Wire eportfolio has allowed us to follow student progress in relation to our competencies and to make adjustments in our instructional practices. Our data has revealed an improvement in the effectiveness of our instruction and this work has been recognized nationally through the Association for General and Liberal Studies Awards for Improving General Education: Effective Program Practices (see a portfolio sampling of our data and results).

Beyond assessment, we are helping our students to use their portfolios for career development. We have been able to use the “rubric escalation” feature with our entire sophomore class as they created their first draft of a professional resume. Our career counselors solicited the help of a small army of peer reviewers who did the preliminary review of more than 500 resumes. Those who were really struggling were “escalated” to the career counselor for more extensive feedback and review.