SUNY Council on Assessment

Navigating Assessment in the Digital Era: Confronting Equity, Inclusion, System Thinking and AI

SCoA Fall 2023 Zoom-In 

November 9, 2023    12:30PM - 2:30PM


SCoA Fall 2023-Zoom-In Focus: 

Effective assessment empowers members of an institution to improve student outcomes collectively, but how can assessment leaders and functional areas support authentic assessment systems in the digital era where applications such as ChatGPT and LaMDA have blurred ethical boundaries in higher education and posed considerable challenges for educators? While much focus has been given to pedagogical adaptations to AI since its inception, in this event, participants will focus on how assessment can be used to address or benefit from AI technologies. Specifically, participants will look at how AI has the potential to widen and narrow equity gaps and become more inclusive and how assessment may be used to address this phenomenon. Participants will also be encouraged to consider improving their assessment methods and tools while reflecting on promising practices as we all navigate assessment in the digital era.  

Outcomes: 

Participants will:
  • Explore SUNY resources and communities of practice related to Artificial Intelligence. 
  • Discuss experiences, strategies and share resources related to Artificial Intelligence. 
  • Understand how to use AI to streamline assessment processes.  
  • Evaluate existing assessment methods and tools while considering how to tailor their approaches to mitigating problems associated with AI use and harnessing potential benefits of AI. 
  • Network, share ideas, reflect, propose challenges, explore, and uncover frameworks and assessment approaches that minimize the impact of equity gaps. 
  • Understand how to leverage assessments to provide authentic and meaningful data for continuous improvement.  
  • Recognize the value of assessment leadership to sustain positive change.




Meet the Speakers


Adrienne Decker, PhD.

Associate Professor/ Dept. of Engineering Education

University at Buffalo

Eunjyu Yu, PhD.

Professor of English            

SUNY Canton

Kenneth Joseph, PhD.

Asst. Professor/ Dept. of Comp. Science & Engineering  

University at Buffalo

Mary Odden, M.S.

Assessment Specialist

University at Buffalo


Klaus Mueller, PhD.

Professor/ Computer Science

Stony Brook University


Adrienne Decker is an Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering Education at the University at Buffalo. She has been studying the teaching and learning of computing for over 20 years. Her work strives to enrich and improve the student experience in computing education, including work in broadening participation. She has been actively involved with the Advanced Placement Computer Science A course since 2011, first serving as a reader, and as part of the development committee for the CSA exam from 2015-2021, serving as higher ed co-chair 2018-2021, and is one of the principal authors of the current Course and Exam Description for CSA. Her currently funded work includes a 3-year NSF IUSE grant (No. 2044179) to study threshold concepts for intermediate computer science students, a 3-year NSF IUSE grant (No. 2143069 and 2110156) to continue the development and dissemination of subgoal labels in the introductory curriculum, a 2-year NSF BPC-DP grant (No. 2137725) to help prepare faculty to manage neurodiversity in their classrooms, and a 5-year NSF IUSE Phase 2 grant (No. 2235644, 2235337, 2235643) to help integrate more equitable computing practices into computer science classrooms. Active in the computing education community, she is currently serving on the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) board as past chair (2022-2025) and was SIGCSE board chair (2019-2022), and board treasurer (2016-2019), program co-chair in 2014 and general co-chair in 2015 for the SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education and sits on the ACM SIG Governing Board Executive Committee as SIG Viability Advisor. She has also served on various other program and review committees.


Dr. Eunjyu Yu is a Professor of English at SUNY- Canton. She has a doctorate in Foreign/Second Language Education from The Ohio State University. Her current research interests include AI-assisted online learning, inclusive pedagogy, and instructional technology. She has received numerous awards, including the first-place winner of the 2018 Open SUNY Effective Practice Awards for her innovative instructional practices and the Honorable Mention of the 2013 English Leadership Quarterly Best Article of the Year Award by the National Council of Teachers of English. She worked as a consultant to the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages.


Kenneth (Kenny) Joseph is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University at Buffalo. He received his Ph.D. from the Societal Computing program at Carnegie Mellon University, was a postdoctoral researcher at the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University, and a former fellow at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science. His research has appeared in a variety of outlets, including The Journal of Mathematical Sociology, a number of top computer science conferences, and Science. His work has also been covered in popular outlets including The Washington Post and The Chicago Tribune.


Mary Odden (she/her) has worked and consulted in assessment in higher education since 2012, currently as an Assessment Specialist in the Office of Curriculum, Assessment & Teaching Transformation at the University at Buffalo. She specializes in student learning outcomes assessment and works with faculty and staff to think strategically about student learning and helps them design assessments that are efficient and effective for both assessor and assessed.  She is currently researching the efficacy of generative AI as a tool to improve student writing. She is a self-professed data-geek who genuinely loves students, learning, and data analysis. She is also an actual geek who loves video games, tabletop games, books, and goofing off with her spouse and child as much as possible.


Klaus Mueller received a PhD in computer science from The Ohio State University in 1998. He is currently a professor in the Computer Science Department at Stony Brook University and he is also a senior scientist at the Computational Science Initiative at Brookhaven National Lab. His current research interests are visual analytics, explainable AI, data science and medical imaging. He won the US National Science Foundation Early Career Award, the SUNY Chancellor Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activity, and the Meritorious Service Certificate and the Golden Core Award of the IEEE Computer Society. In 2018 Klaus was inducted into the National Academy of Inventors. To date, he has authored more than 300 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers, which have been cited more than 12,500 times. He is a frequent speaker at international conferences, has organized or participated in 18 tutorials on various topics, chaired the IEEE Visualization Conference in 2009, was elected chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Visualization and Computer Graphics (VGTC) from 2012-2015, and  served as the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics from 2019-2022. He is a senior member of the IEEE.


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