Sample Available Tools for Assessing Inclusive Teaching Efforts
The following tools can be helpful starting points for instructors interested in assessing their inclusive teaching efforts across a variety of dimensions.
Measuring Inclusive Course and Syllabus Design. Instructors can use the tools and frameworks below to measure inclusivity at the level of course design. Existing syllabi can be evaluated using these tools, revised, and reassessed.
Inclusive Teaching Higher Education Rubric
This rubric, provided in the appendix of the book, can help instructors self-assess their inclusive teaching efforts by applying specific standards across a variety of teaching and learning areas.
Universal Design for Learning Educator Worksheet
Using this worksheet, instructors can consider how the design of their course follows the principles of universal design for learning.
The Inclusive Course Design Tool (ICDT)
This tool contains a number of reflective questions that can be used to promote inclusive course design.
Inclusion by Design: Survey Your Syllabus and Course Design
This survey can help instructors examine the impact of their efforts at the level of course design.
Diversity Inclusivity Framework
Instructors can use this framework to assess how the different components of a course are inclusive with regards to diversity.
Gender Balance Assessment Tool (GBAT)
This tool allows instructors to assess the gender balance of a syllabus or bibliography to advance gender inclusivity.
Social Justice Syllabus Design Tool
Allows instructors to assess their syllabi in a systematic manner with regards to an emphasis on social justice.
Capturing Student Demographics through a Technological Tool. The tool described in this section captures students demographics for a course.
An application that provides instructors with a dashboard of information containing their students’ demographic backgrounds (e.g. first generation status, low income status, etc.) and can be used to understand class profile to inform inclusivity efforts. This app was originally developed and utilized at the University of California, Davis.
Measuring Students’ Sense of Belonging. Whether students feel welcome can be assessed at the level of the institution, department, or course depending on the scope of the assessment project.
Institution
National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE)
Includes specific questions focused on student belonging to provide an overall sense of whether students feel welcome.
National Assessment of Collegiate Campus Climates (NACCC)
A survey that includes questions focused on students’ perceptions of their colleges’ commitment to diversity and inclusion and related efforts.
Department or Course-Level
Departmental Sense of Belonging and Involvement Questionnaire (DeSBI) (McCartney et al., 2020)
An instrument developed to assess students’ sense of belonging to a Biology Department.
Sense of Belonging Instrument (SOBI) (Hagerty & Patusky, 1995)
A broad survey measuring students’ holistic experiences with belonging.
Psychological Sense of School Membership (Goodenow, 1993)
Adaptations of this survey were used by Freeman et al. (2007) to explore the general sense of belonging in undergraduates, perceived acceptance by instructors, and social acceptance on campus. This survey has been considered controversial in the field due to its ambiguous structure, but has been used widely.
Assessment of Bias. The tests described below can be used to increase awareness of bias.
Instructors who have a pedagogical goal to increase their awareness of biases, may consider taking the tests to become more aware of biases, reflect upon such biases with regards to their classroom teaching, and reassess at a later date.
Conceptual Understanding. Gauging students’ conceptual understanding at the beginning and end of a course or unit can help instructors design responsive instruction for students with differing prior knowledge or skills. The measures discussed below can be useful for such purposes.
Concept Inventories
To examine whether differences exist in the conceptual understanding of students from differing demographic backgrounds, instructors can consider administering concept inventories to students, then after a pedagogical change, reassess to measure pre-/post- change. Instructors can search teaching and learning journals in their fields to find existing published concept inventories. Please note that these have been published largely within STEM disciplines.
Additional Measures of Student Thinking
Concept inventories often focus more heavily on measuring students’ knowledge rather than their thinking. Other measures may include two-tier multiple choice questions, oral interviews, problem-sorting tasks, and other types of assessments (Smith & Tanner, 2010).
References Cited
Freeman, T.M., Anderman, L.H., Jensen, J.M. (2007). Sense of Belonging in College Freshmen at the Classroom and Campus Levels. The Journal of Experimental Education, 75(3), 203-220.
Goodenow, C. (1993). The psychological sense of school membership among adolescents: Scale development and educational correlates. Psychology in the Schools, 30, 79-90. doi:10.1002/1520-6807(199301)30:1<79::AID-PITS2310300113>3.0.CO;2-X
Haggerty, B.M., & Patusky, K. (1995). Developing a measure of sense of belonging. Nursing Research, 44(1), 9-13.
Smith, J.I. & Tanner, K. (2010). The problem of revealing how students think: Concept inventories and beyond. CBE Life Sciences Education, 9(1), 1-5. doi: 10.1187/cbe.09-12-0094.