The "Student Assessment of Learning Gains" Web Site is designed as a way for you, as an instructor, to receive feedback from your students about how various elements of the course are helping your students to learn. This instrument can help guide you in modifying your course so as to enhance student learning. It may be used at any point during the course or at the end.

Please read the following instructions to get an idea of what you can do. For ease of use, you may want to print out this page and refer to it as you navigate the site.

This web site is currently housed in the Wisconsin Center for Education Research (WCER) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Any information that you place on this site is for your benefit only, and will not be revealed to any person, department or agency without your permission.

You can delete all data that you place on the site, with the exception of your personal registration information. If you would like that removed as well, you can contact the web administrator.

Your data is accessible only through your email address and password. It is up to you to keep that information secure.

In order to use this site, you'll need to register or log in. You need only register once. Registration simply allows us to keep a record that will allow us to link you to both your instrument and to the students' responses for each course that you register. We require that you complete four of the fields -- the others are optional. Two of these fields (email address and password) will be your login information.

When you log on as a registered user, you will be directed to a page which lists the courses that you have registered with the system. This is essentially your home page. It contains links to:

• register a new course
• update your registration information
• select from your registered course set the one for which you would to create an instrument or see the results.

You can register as many courses as you like from your home page. Registering for a course involves:

• typing course identifiers for the course, so that both you and your students can easily recognize it.
• supplying a course password. This will allow your students to access the completed instrument on-line. For your own security, please use a different password from the one you use to enter the system.

Each registered course has its own "home page," where you can:

• Make changes to the instrument
  • Edit the instrument
  • replace the instrument with an existing one (developed by us or by another instructor)
  • replace the instrument with one you have created for another of your registered courses
  • save your instrument as an example for others
  • view the instrument as your students will see it
• See student responses
  • see a list of the students who have responded to the instrument
  • view student responses as raw data
  • view some tabulated data

Once you have registered the course, you can modify on-line a instrument template to fit the structure of your course. (You are welcome to save this,modify it, and print it out on your own as well, without using the other services on this site). You can modify the instrument by adding/deleting/changing the statements under each question (questions 1 - 6). However, the type of answers (NA, 1 - 5) that students can complete cannot be changed.

Note!!! Writing good questions can be very difficult. Keep in mind how your students will interpret the questions as they read through the Instrument. Will they read the statement the way you intended, especially given the scales that the Instrument uses? In addition, if the Instrument is too long, a student is likely to get distracted and not complete the Instrument. Limit your questions to those which concern you the most.

Once you have registered the course, you can also copy a template Instrument that we, or an instructor who has used this site, has developed. When you select this option, you receive a list of courses ordered by department, so you can quickly choose one from your area.

Once you have registered the course, you can view the Instrument as your students will complete it on-line. It might be a good idea to read through each question here for clarity.

When the Instrument has been modifed to suit your course structure, it is ready for your students to complete on line. For security purposes, we do not record the students' names or other identifying features. You should supply each student with:

• the course ID that you received after registering the course
• the course password
• a unique id number (greater than -2147483648 and less than 2147483647 -- for security purposes, it is best not to use your students' social security numbers, even if they are available)

Students can complete Instrument at this URL: http://work.wcer.wisc.edu/salgains/student/default.asp

NOTE!!!This website allows you a lot of freedom in viewing your students' responses. A cunning instructor could link their student responses to their ids. It is a good idea to respect your students' privacy and let them know that you plan to do so.

For each course, you can quickly check how many, and which, students have completed the Instrument when you have logged in. This can be helpful if you have decided to require participation in the Instrument for you class.

You can view and download the numerical data in three table forms: as raw data (with student IDs masked by a new id to protect their privacy); as tabulated with frequencies, averages, and standard deviation for each question; and, do your own crosstabulations online. The first two can be viewed in html form, as an excel file, and as a tab-delimited text file. You can also view your students comments about the course as an html or text file.

When you are finished with the Instrument, you can remove a course from the system. Be sure to download any data before you choose this option, because this option deletes all course information from the system.