If your school or university regularly works with external stakeholders, such as cooperating teachers, field instructors, clinical practice supervisors, and/or internship supervisors, you are likely aware of just how busy their respective schedules are from one day to the next. This reality can render the process of collecting invaluable student performance data from such external stakeholders difficult, at best. With Taskstream, you can easily collect student performance data while respecting the busy schedules of your institution’s external stakeholders.
Before an external stakeholder can access Taskstream, he/she needs to be set up with a Taskstream account. Taskstream accounts for external stakeholders are complimentary and can be easily created by you (or an administrator with the appropriate level of permissions). As soon as the account is created, a welcome message can be sent to the external stakeholder, thereby allowing him/her to immediately access the system.
You might be thinking, “It’s great that I can create accounts so easily, but how will our external stakeholders know when their student is ready to be evaluated?” The good news is, in Taskstream, you can have students submit an evaluation request, or even turn in a work product, that will automatically notify the appropriate external stakeholder Outcomes Assessment Projects (formerly Aqua) email that his/her student is ready to be evaluated.
As seen in the illustration above, students can complete a form for their field experience/evaluation requirement with a simple check box stating that they are ready to be evaluated. Then, the student can either select his/her cooperating teacher (they may already be grouped with their cooperating teacher if you’re using grouping) and the cooperating teacher will automatically receive an email indicating that his/her student is ready to be evaluated. A student can also submit a work product, such as a lesson plan, to his/her cooperating teacher and the cooperating teacher will get an email notification that work is ready to be evaluated.
Once external evaluators have completed their evaluations you can easily access this data to analyze student performance and compare your external evaluators’ scores with the internship supervisors’ scores.
If the evaluators used a form to score the students, for example, you are able to run a form report that will show responses by all respondents, as shown below.
In the screenshot above, we can see three different cases. Imagine these cases represent scores from the professor (case 1), the cooperating teacher (case 2) and the university supervisor (case 3). With this report, you can easily compare the scores given by each evaluator.
If, on the other hand, a rubric was used to evaluate the students instead of a form, a rubric criteria report can be used to compare the scores given by each evaluator. In our example below, you can view the scores given by each evaluator all on a single report and have the ability to compare the results from each group.
Regardless of the evaluation instrument used, these reports will allow you to accurately determine areas of satisfactory performance and, more importantly, areas for growth. After all, the main purpose of assessment is to continuously improve student learning, and experiences outside of the classroom are a critical component of the learning experience.
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