ASSESSING GENERAL EDUCATION

General Education - Skill Assessment

UMF's current General Education program was introduced in 1999 and has been continually revised since then in order to improve the program. More revisions are being considered. Although the current General Education program has clearly defined goals and objectives (see the 1999 General Education statements of philosophy, goals, and intended outcomes in the General Education Advisor’s Handbook), there is little data as to whether or not we are achieving these goals.  Revisions of the program are based not on data, but on opinion, intuition, and idiosyncratic incidents.  The result is no clear mandate for any kind of reform, no true legitimacy for the program as one that achieves its objectives, and uncertainty about what these goals and objectives mean for instructors and students.  Without assessment, General Education is based on faith—a faith that the program developed works and that instructors will correctly understand the goals and know how to design courses to achieve them.

 A new aspect of the 1999 General Education program was the introduction of skill development as a part of UMF General Education.   Although these skills--writing, public presentation, research, and technology—should be acquired by all students, skill development means different things for different disciplines.   Writing for a scientific journals is different from creative writing, research in English is different from research in Geography.  This means that programs are given the task of assuring their majors develop skills in ways appropriate for their field, often in ways that vary across disciplines, not able to be measured through standardized tests or surveys.  For that reason, skill assessment is more effective at the program level.   Programs have already defined what the skill goals mean for their discipline/program and thus already have laid the foundation for assessing whether or not they achieve general education goals.

By giving the task to programs of assuring skill development, there is a danger that programs will be uneven in their adherence to this task, making "general education" something that varies from student to student, not just in the way a skill is developed, but the importance given to skill development.  If that is the case, this would not truly be institution wide "general education," but rather a part of the major that varies between programs and depends on the relative importance a program places on skill development.  In order to truly consider this a component of general education, there must be a way of assessing skill development in a manner that demonstrates comparable development across programs.

Beyond that, if programs are simply commanded to develop skills and then left to do so without any kind of assessment mechanism in place, the whole thing could be a fraud.  Programs, even well intentioned, may not be achieving the results promised to students as part of the education and training we provide. We need to know we are achieving what we tell perspective students and their families that we do.  Especially in a time of budget cuts and economic uncertainty, the ability to demonstrate that we not only provide knowledge but essential skills will impress both perspective students and legislators considering university funding levels.

Finally, assessment of the skills component of general education can suggest possible needs for improvement in the program, ranging from a reconsideration of the goals and objectives associated with each skill to the very way a skill is defined.  Knowledge shared across disciplines that, absent assessment, would be locked within programs can also be used to help programs better determine how to create tools to assure their students achieve better results.  The data assessment can shape both future general education reform as well as help programs enhance their own ability to provide skill training.

This kind of assessment is a difficult task.  Like any social scientific research endeavor, the myriad of factors contributing to outcomes is great, and one cannot control for the outside noise.  All results are going to be suspect and subject to multiple interpretation.  This does not, however, mean we should ditch the idea of assessment.  Rather, comparisons across programs, considering both their results and assessment methods, will help us develop stronger interpretations of the results and point to issues that may need more research.

For these reasons assessment is both necessary and desirable if we are to have confidence in the General Education program, particularly the skill development portion.

What do you think?  Please e-mail Doug Rawlings with your comments.  rawlings@maine.edu

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