Preliminary Results of the College’s Application of SmarterMeasure

As part of its Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP), J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College adopted SmarterMeasure, an assessment tool that assesses student readiness for learning within the online classroom.  SmarterMeasure evaluates students’ skills and attributes in seven distinct areas: Life Factors, Personal Attributes, Technical Competency, Technical Knowledge, Reading Rate and Recall, Learning Styles, and Typing Speed and Accuracy. After piloting SmarterMeasure in Spring 2010 through volunteer faculty in online courses, the College fully implemented the assessment in Summer 2010. At present SmarterMeasure is delivered to incoming students as a part of placement evaluations, and distance learning faculty are also asked to integrate the tool within their first-week assignments in order to reach returning students. Since its incorporation at the College, close to 4000 students have completed the SmarterMeasure assessment.

The QEP Team has begun its principal analyses of SmarterMeasure and what it reveals about JSRCC students. Information gleaned from these analyses will guide the team in its development of a comprehensive student orientation to learning online and in its development of remediation modules that will help students to bolster their areas of weakness. The first round of data focuses upon all of the distance learning students who both completed the SmarterMeasure assessment and enrolled in at least one online course.  In the next few weeks, the data will be investigated further as the team evaluates first-time distance learners, various demographic factors, and displaced workers (the specific focus of the College’s FIPSE grant).