Data Analytics

A Simple DIY Approach to Tracking and Improving Student Learning Outcomes

A professor and former dean of performance excellence at San Antonio College uses Excel data to inform his instruction and achieve better learning outcomes for his students.

As the director of institutional research and then dean of performance excellence at San Antonio College, David A. Wood, Jr. had the capacity to use all kinds of sophisticated modeling and statistical tools and techniques to help measure and influence student learning outcomes. Now that he's back to teaching astronomy at the college (a move he's "ecstatic" about), he has turned to a self-created Excel spreadsheet to manage the data he needs to improve learning outcomes for the students in his own classes.

Wood's basic approach has increased scores on tests by five to 10 points, he said. More importantly, the quality of the types of questions students are asking in class suggests they're understanding more about the topics being covered. Best of all, his technique is easily replicable by any instructor who cares to test it out. Those who have tried are big fans.

The Magic Formula

As an associate professor of astronomy, Wood teaches a course about the solar system. During that class, which he teaches both face-to-face and online, he gives two midterms and a final exam to assess what his students are learning. Those tests aren't "gimmes" — Wood said that he makes "some of those exam questions particularly challenging," in order to force his students to do critical thinking.

Here's Wood's magic formula: He tracks how each student does with each test question and performs an item analysis after each exam, which tells him "right away" where his students have understanding and where they're struggling. Having those results tells the faculty member where he needs to put the emphasis in the next section of the course.

Wood tracks students' scores for each exam question across all three exams in his course.

"If we are struggling, for example, with the concept of 'escape velocity,' then I know when we are talking about atmospheric escape in the second third of the course, I'm going to have to go back and talk about escape velocity again. I bring those pieces back so that we hit them again," he said.

While the course has "four or five" official learning outcomes, Wood himself uses nine learning outcomes, of which the official ones make up a subset. At the end of the term Wood uses a summation of what students have demonstrated on the three exams to tell him which outcomes they've mastered.

Each exam question is linked to a given learning outcome set for the course both institutionally and by the instructor.

The same spreadsheet that monitors how students did individually against the exam questions also tracks how they do against the learning outcomes. That information goes into an institutional system for cross-campus tracking.

As Wood explained, "When students accumulate enough between [exams] to demonstrate the mastery of the concept, my Excel spreadsheet turns on an 'x' in that particular box for that student." That's translated into eLumen, the college's learning outcomes tracking software.