Assessment of Student Learning

General Education Subcommittee

Spring 2009

Minutes

Meeting #1: Feb. 4, 2009 – 9:30 a.m.

Present: Julie Eckerle (convener), Tom Johnson, Laura Thoma

Business/Discussion:

• All agreed that there was some confusion about our mandate and that we would prefer to get some insights from Dean Contant before proceeding further. Julie offered to contact Dean Contant before scheduling the next meeting – ideally when she can be present.

Meeting #2: March 4, 2009 – 2:15 p.m.

Present: Julie Eckerle (convener), Tom Johnson, Laura Thoma

Business/Discussion:

• Dean Contant was unable to make the meeting—as planned—because an earlier meeting ran longer than expected.
• Julie announced that Jeff Ratliff-Crain will be joining our subcommittee and that Kristin Lamberty will likely be returning from leave soon. Julie agreed to contact Jeff and Kristin before the next meeting.
• Julie, Tom, and Laura brainstormed about improvements needed in assessment tools campus-wide by looking at data from the NSSE survey and the General Education survey and at the language of the General Education goals in the current UMM catalogue. Issues raised included the following:
• How to make students see many of the General Education goals as more important? (Students rate more highly whether the coursework achieves the goals than they do the idea that such courses/goals are important).
• Whether we imagine General Education goals/outcomes as thresholds students must meet or simply as a steady growth in knowledge? The current UMM approach seems to be the latter, thought the catalogue language on p. 57 seems to contradict this idea (“UMM courses designated as appropriate for meeting general education requirements are those which, if passed successfully, demonstrate the student’s competency in a given skill or area”). On the other hand, the materials from the Indianapolis conference on assessment in October suggest a need for threshold outcomes.
• Whether we need to revise some of the language for General Education goals/objectives (related to above point)?
• How to access the faculty opinion of the General Education requirements? All agreed that we would be glad to hear Jeff’s insight into this and into the impetus for revisiting the General Education program.
• Whether it makes sense to have General Education courses at the upper-division levels?
• How to produce clearer, more useful survey results? Tom suggested the following:
• Changing the wording of the questions in the General Education survey to match the key on the results (for example, “moderately” on the results is not an option in the actual survey)
• Changing the answer options to distinguish, for example, between “quite important” and “very important.”
• Julie, Tom, and Laura decided what additional information they would like, and Julie agreed to request this data from the appropriate sources:
• more up-to-date General Education survey data (we have data through 2005)
• response rate information for the General Education survey data
• more detailed information about the distribution of responses (number of people who gave each answer) to the “importance” and “achieved” questions on the General Education survey
• a sense of what courses students are actually taking in order to meet their General Education requirements

Meeting #3: March 11, 2009 – 2:15 p.m.

Present: Julie Eckerle (convener), Kristin Lamberty, Jeff Ratliff-Crain, Laura Thoma

Business/Discussion:

• Julie provided updates on the information requested from Nancy Helsper and Clare Strand:
• The 2009 student survey of General Education ended on March 6. Nancy will compile this data and send (1) reports for 2006-09 and (2) response rates for 2006-09. She will do this as soon as possible, hopefully in about 2 weeks.
• We will not be able to get information on the particular courses students take for Gen Ed. As Clare explains, “The software used to run APAS has the capability but the University has not had the resources (money or human) to utilize this functionality.”
• Those present discussed how this information (that we can’t get from the registrar) might be useful and if there are other means to get it. Suggestions included:
• Creating the query for the data ourselves. Would this help?
• Looking to student evaluations, which ask why students are taking the courses (should we ask Lynn?). Julie agreed to ask Nancy or Lynn for this information.
• Looking at a form Jeff received from Jeri, which indicates how many people take all courses with a Gen Ed designator. Jeff agreed to circulate this form to the group.
• Jeff explained the work he is supposed to do in regards to Gen Ed (see below)
• Julie said she will schedule the next meeting when she has received the requested data from Nancy. At that time, we can talk about that data as well as the form that Jeff will send.

Jeff’s “Report”:

There was a partial evaluation of Gen Ed at the time of semester conversion, but there has been no substantive assessment of Gen Ed since. The conclusion: we need to evaluate and assess Gen Ed.

The Gen Ed subcommittee of the Curriculum Committee was disbanded a few years ago. Conclusion: there is no group on campus specifically charged with the assessment of Gen Ed.

Jeff’s position as Assistant Dean encompasses Gen Ed. Conclusion: His job is to head up a thorough assessment of Gen Ed. When he realized that this committee was also thinking about the assessment tools currently used to evaluate Gen Ed, he realized it might be useful for us all to work together.

Jeff has developed a 4-part plan for beginning to assess Gen Ed:

(1) Get a better sense of what courses students are using for Gen Ed. (Clearly this step intersects with this subcommittee’s request for information from the registrar—see above).

• Ask disciplines about courses they offer for non-majors.
• Focus on courses with highest percentage of non-major enrollment (even if majors enroll, too.
• To determine these courses (from a discipline perspective), ask:
• How are we marketing these courses?
• Which courses would be really like non-majors to enroll in?

(2) Look at enrollments within each Gen Ed designator.

• Look at form provided by Jeri (and discussed above), on which courses are sorted by Gen Ed designator and class size.

(3) Bring together 5-10 faculty who teach courses within each Gen Ed designator to have a conversation about what they are trying to accomplish, what is working, etc. This step is essential because we need to be able to say what we’re doing and why before we can say how we’re doing it. [Julie agreed by pointing to a discrepancy in the current catalogue about whether Gen Ed is intended to enable students to meet particular thresholds in their knowledge of a subject or simply to progress in their knowledge of that subject. See minutes for Meeting #2 above.]

(4) Provide evidence leading to evaluation and revision. Questions to be considered include the following:

• Do all courses need to have a Gen Ed designator?
• Is “double-dipping” possible and/or acceptable?