HOW DO WE ASSESS?

One thing to sort out is which questions are immediate and pressing for the short term. Another is which questions target issues related to foundation courses, distribution courses, pedagogical or theoretical issues, and administrative issues. A third is what we would like to put in place so that gen ed can be assessed over time and modified periodically.

A few examples of methods for getting at what we need to know might help. These are certainly not original—in fact, several have been proposed by different committees or individuals already, starting with the 1999 gen ed assessment proposal, and a few are already being done. This is also certainly a partial list; there are other approaches, each approach is topic-dependent, and some are short-term while others require time and specific assessment tools.

Short term:
• survey and/or interview students in focus groups about specific issues prioritized by faculty (user-friendliness, sense of distinction between courses with different designations, learning experiences in courses, etc.)
• survey and/or interview faculty about specific issues (this will happen naturally at the January gathering)
• review course evaluations of foundations and distribution courses from the past few years to develop questions about possible areas of trouble, and maybe to design new or additional evaluation questions
• survey advisors and administrators in order to ascertain numbers of problems, kinds of issues, value to advisees of potential changes

Long term:
• review course materials and program or departmental statements about goals and objectives; design assessment tools to determine whether objectives are being met (including both whether courses are covering what was intended and whether students are learning what was intended—two different issues)
• systematically check results of evaluations of student work already in place, in order to find out what general education skills have been acquired in various core courses (this entails using graded products as the preliminary objects of program assessment—identifying the skills has already been done, so ascertaining how many students are acquiring each skill and then targeting desired improvement in those numbers is a possible step)

• implement first-year/third year writing samples and other first-year/third-year indicators
• use final projects that seniors are producing to find out how students are or aren’t successfully “getting it” in terms of their general education experience (review by committee, for example, of random selections of a senior, capstone, portfolio, or other project)
• develop pre- and post-tests for specific issues in foundation and/or distribution courses (these could be issues of knowledge acquisition, changed attitudes or perceptions, etc.—not all skills can be demonstrated right away, although students can articulate their knowledge about those skills)

What do you think?  Please e-mail Doug Rawlings with your comments.  rawlings@maine.edu or join our discussion board:

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