SearchLight's flexible course assessment methods allow faculty and administrators to assess students through either direct or indirect means.

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Direct Assessments

• Assess with performance criteria that satisfy program level outcomes 

• Assess with customized course instruments (i.e. exams, quizes)

• Course instruments can be mapped to multiple course outcomes

• Course outcome assessments automatically map to program outcomes

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Department heads setup program level outcomes and associated performance criteria for each outcome. Faculty can then use these metrics to assess students or they can choose to customize the process by setting up their own course outcomes and associated instruments (i.e. Exams/Quizzes). All they have to do is tell SearchLight how each course outcome maps to program outcomes, then they can use their customized course outcomes to assess their students. All the data is automatically mapped by SearchLight into program level outcomes for review. 

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Indirect Assessments

•   Gather data through surveys 

• Questions from surveys can be mapped to program outcomes

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SearchLight also offers the capability to perform assessments through surveys. Faculty can create end-of-course surveys to gauge the effectiveness of a course. Questions from surveys can be mapped to program outcomes thus allowing survey responses to be aggregated with direct assessments for review.

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Flexible Assessment Metrics

• Define program outcomes with associated performance criteria 

• Customize the assignments of performance criteria to courses

• Define course outcomes and instruments, where instruments are mapped to multiple course outcomes

• Assess with either program or course outcomes

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With SearchLight you can create Program Outcomes and Performance Criteria for your entire department one time, then quickly assign a customized combination of them to individual courses. Faculty members can define Course Outcomes that are more suitable for their individual courses and create instruments that map to one or more Course Outcomes. Course Outcomes, in turn, can map to one or more Performance Criteria associated with Program Outcomes. Faculty can then choose to assess students with either program or course outcomes.

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Multiple Assessment Entry Methods

• Gradebook style entry allows assessments for an entire course to be entered at one time 

•  Interactive rubrics allow simple, point and click, functionality 

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SearchLight employs the familiar paridigm of a gradebook to help faculty quickly and easily enter assessment data with Microsoft Excel. You also have the option of using an interactive rubric, in which you simply click on the appropriate score to assign for a assessment metric.

•  Store course related data (i.e. grade distribution, student feedback, reflections) 

•  Progress of course can be tracked over years or even decades

SearchLight helps your institution track the progress of courses over time by allowing faculty to store pertanant information about a course. Information, such as grade distribution, student feedback, reflections etc., can be stored with a course for later retrieval. So as faculty fine tune their instructional approach over time, the system gathers and stores student and faculty feedback data, which serves as a snap shot of a course at any given time. This allows the progress of a course to be tracked over years or even decades.

• Aggregate assessment data statistics into comprehensive data tables and graphs 

• Aggregate data by courses, outcomes, surveys or a combination of courses and surveys 

• Graphs allow you to drill down from program outcomes, to performance criteria, to courses or surveys

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What happens once you've collected all the information you need? SearchLight allows you to quickly explore your assessment statistics through comprehensive data tables and graphs. You choose how you want your data aggregated: by courses, by outcomes, by surveys or by a combination of both courses and surveys. You can break down graphs, showing statistics by program outcome, to reveal the individual performance criteria that satisfy an outcome. You can further drill down beyond a performance criteria to reveal the courses and/or surveys that satisfy that performance criteria.

• Automatically generate Faculty Course Assessment Reports (FCAR) 

• Include assessments by course and program outcomes as well as other course related information

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Since SearchLight allows you to store course related information as well as student assessments with a course, you can automatically generate reports at any time with a click of the mouse. These Faculty Course Assessment Reports (FCAR), which include assessment metrics by course outcomes or program outcomes, as well as course information such as grade distribution and student feedback, are suitable for department reviews as well as accreditation reviews.