By Sinjini Mitra
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Assessment is an integral part of instruction. It determines whether student learning goals of a course/program are met while driving decisions regarding pedagogical changes and curriculum advancement. Assessment methods include both direct and indirect approaches to capturing student outcomes from different perspectives (Menhart, 2011). We will discuss the role of both direct and indirect measures in assessing how well a diverse group of undergraduate students at a minority-serving institution learn introductory business statistics concepts to determine if both sets of assessment outcomes match or if there are discrepancies between them, and how this can potentially inform pedagogical changes. Direct assessment data were obtained from an exam administered in an undergraduate business statistics course (81 students) consisting of 10 multiple-choice questions, two from each of the five key topics, namely, descriptive statistics, normal distribution, interval estimation, hypothesis testing, and regression. Indirect assessment data were obtained via an online survey administered to the same students which included questions that were meant to understand students’ self-perceptions about their overall learning in their course and in terms of achieving the course learning goals, topics that they found the most challenging, their overall interest and motivation in the course, and their self-assessment of their overall learning. Our analysis demonstrated both similarities and dissimilarities in the findings from the two assessment methods. For example, student scores were lower for normal distribution although students found the topic to be easy. We discuss other similar findings and important pointers for pedagogical improvements in areas that are challenging for students via additional example videos created by the instructors, supplementary resources like external videos (YouTube, Khan Academy), tutorials/applets, more in-class practice opportunities, and in-depth exam reviews. The key take-away from this research is thus that multiple methods of assessment are crucial to obtaining a comprehensive picture of student learning.