The Teamwork Behind CATT’s Assessment and Instructional Support Efforts

Namely, that CATT seeks to provide a much better integration of assessment results with critical improvement efforts in areas like instruction and curricular design. What I’d like to focus on here is to provide a complementary post to speak more about how it is that we hope to achieve this. During our merge process, significant attention was paid to the precise ways in which we could leverage and align staff expertise in the formation of the most effective teams to meet pressing faculty needs. As such, below is an overview of what each of CATT’s teams is currently working on as we navigate the outset of the 2021-22 academic year. 

The Educational Effectiveness and Learning Analytics Team is continuing to ensure that programs are assessing student learning in conjunction with our broader university accreditation standards and obligations. They are managing and facilitating program reviews for various degree programs, while also assisting the academic units and the Office of Academic Affairs with critical assessment projects.

The Learning Environments and Technologies Team continues to support the University’s primary learning management system, UB Learns (Blackboard). Additionally, this team is currently reviewing physical learning spaces on campus and compiling critical information on classroom features to better understand how to advise future approaches to classroom pedagogical enhancements and innovations.

The Teaching Transformation Team is continuing the efforts, begun under CEI, of direct faculty support via the Academies. In addition to regular programmatic support through our core faculty development curriculum, this team also supports faculty ad-hoc through one-on-one consults as various issues arise throughout the academic year.

The Research Analytics and Strategic Initiatives Team seeks to pull together efforts of the previous three teams by reviewing assessment and analytics data in order to identify areas where support is needed or critical.   

In sum, through an overview of the work coming from these teams, we can more explicitly show how CATT is helping Academic Affairs to ensure that we are providing the institution with high-quality twenty-first century learning and educational experiences for our students. Our CATT teams are working respectively on these precise problems and issues arising at the intersection of assessment and instruction. Through our attention to such problems, CATT is providing our faculty with the tools and complimentary instructional knowledge to more effectively pursue academic excellence and student success.