UCLA?s Center for the Advancement of Teaching (CAT) supports faculty, administrators, postdoctoral scholars, and graduate students in serving their mission of fostering and championing effective teaching. Within CAT sits a dedicated centrally located Center for Educational Assessment (CEA) unit that regularly collaborates with faculty and campus partners by drawing on its expertise in pedagogy, educational assessment, and curricular research. CEA has a history of participating in assessment of various graduate student and postdoctoral programs at UCLA including the campus-wide Teaching Assistant Training Program, CIRTL graduate student Teaching-as-Research Program, Nanosystems Engineering Research Center, and the NIH IRACDA program for postdoctoral scholars. With this experience CAT is optimally positioned and well-equipped to house a centralized assessment resource dedicated to evaluate NIH-funding training programs, starting with Cellular and Molecular Biology (CMB) Training Program as a model. UCLA NIH-funded training programs need a common platform for assessment. Over the last decade, UCLA has built extensive infrastructure and developed innovative programs for graduate student and postdoctoral scholar career development training. However, this raises a significant need to assess training program goals and outcomes to inform program improvement. At any given time, UCLA has over 40 NIH-funded training grants but lacks a dedicated system and standardized process for training program evaluation. Consequently, programs are currently addressing this need on an ad hoc basis. The goal of this supplement is to develop a centralized assessment resource with the capacity to collect, analyze, and archive participant data and programmatic outcomes applicable to most, if not all, training programs at UCLA. CEA work will include the development of standard assessment resources and the creation of an online dashboard to share the assessment results. The effectiveness of this assessment process will be evaluated by building a base of samples that would become available on the dashboard, monitoring ongoing activities, and tracking accomplishments and research merit. As UCLA supports this commitment to document the experience of trainees, we will seek additional funding to expand this project over time.
Within UCLA?s Center for the Advancement of Teaching sits the Center for Educational Assessment (CEA) with expertise in pedagogy, educational assessment, and curricular research. CEA has a history of participating in assessment of various graduate student and postdoctoral programs at UCLA and is optimally positioned and well-equipped to house a centralized assessment resource dedicated to evaluate NIH-funded training programs.
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