Last week we administered our lab skills assessments (LSA) through our in-house assessment platform. While this is our fifth time administering our LSAs virtually, I thought it would be interesting to see the types of inquiries our teaching assistants raise during assessment periods and what the response time was to begin resolve those inquiries from the teaching lab staff. The response time was recorded using the message timestamp from Slack. A few notes were recorded about the context of the message and categories were developed while drafting the visualization.

Upon quick glance, the visualization demonstrates that the lab staff are generally quick to respond to inquiries from teaching assistants and nearly half of inquiries were to ensure a student properly submitted their assessment. For many inquiries, a response from the lab staff included a resolution/answer allowing teaching assistants to relay the information quicker. However, as the visualization below indicates, the time until resolution was generally longer than the initial response time, which makes sense as additional information may be needed and conversation between multiple people emerges.

This data also highlights the areas where the implementation of the assessments could improve, and consequently influence departmental or internal lab staff policy. For example, nearly a quarter of inquiries stemmed from the shared campus server our platform is hosted on reaching our maximum allocated connections. This information could be used to justify allocating funds to purchase a dedicated server for our platform providing more control and reliability for our assessment platform. Similarly, inquiries identifying question mistakes or clarifying question wording could be reduced by requiring additional reviews from the lab staff – a policy that has already been decided on for the next term.