A major premise of the 2015-16 General Education assessment project is that course assignments and exams help students develop and demonstrate the intended learning outcomes of the GE requirement(s) a course meets. This enables instructors to gather evidence of student learning in relation to any GE outcome directly from the work students are doing to meet course requirements. The General Education Student Learning Report is designed to be completed while an instructor is grading the relevant work. Instructors are encouraged to select the learning outcome they plan to assess and to identify the corresponding assignment(s) from which they will gather evidence while they are planning the course syllabus and assignments.
- Consult the General Education assessment project website to determine which course and GE requirement you are being asked to assess, and in which academic term. The list of GE instructors and courses prepared by the IR&E includes an assessment “assignment” for each instructor offering a GE-accredited course in 2015-16. The list is designed to be generally representative of the types of courses being offered for each GE requirement, both by department/program and by term. Instructors are asked to gather evidence in their designated course and term, and for their designated requirement, unless the instructor prefers to gather evidence in a different course or term or for a different GE requirement. If a different “assignment” would work better for you, please email ge-assessment@stolaf.edu and indicate the term, course number and title, and GE requirement you will assess instead.
- Determine which outcome within your designated GE requirement you will assess. Review the list of intended learning outcomes for the GE requirement you are investigating and decide which one will be the focus of your evidence-gathering. You can make this determination on any basis you wish. You may want to investigate an outcome that pertains to a change you are making in the course, or that is of particular significance to your department, or that you are simply curious about. Or you may decide to gather evidence on the outcome that is easiest to observe in your students’ work. Choose whatever outcome is most likely to yield results of interest to you.
- Determine which assignment(s) you will use as the source of your evidence. Consider the papers, projects, presentations, and exams that reflect the learning outcome you have decided to assess. From these, select the assignment(s) that will best represent your students’ achievement in relation to that outcome by the time they have completed your course. The assignment(s) need not be final exams or papers; some GE learning outcomes may be cultivated earlier in a course, so a mid-semester sample of student work might be more appropriate to the outcome you have selected. In many courses, a single exam section or assignment may be the best source of evidence for the outcome an instructor is examining; in other courses, an instructor may wish to gather evidence from two, or at most three, work samples. Choose whatever is most meaningful and representative.
- Complete an (optional) Intended Learning Outcome worksheet while you are grading the relevant work. When an instructor assigns a grade to a paper, project, or presentation, the grade represents a summary judgment about many outcomes for one student. The Intended Learning Outcome worksheet is a simple tool that allows an instructor to examine one outcome for many students. The quality of each student’s work in relation to the intended learning outcome of interest is identified as “exemplary,” “satisfactory,” “emerging” or “not present,” and then results for the class as a whole are summarized. The worksheet also provides space for the instructor to record qualitative observations about the characteristics of work in each category of achievement (e.g, what does “exemplary” work look like, and how is it different from “satisfactory” or “emerging” work?) The worksheet is for the instructor’s use only; it is not intended for submission with the instructor’s final report.
- Complete and submit the General Education Student Learning Report within two weeks of the submission of final course grades. The report will include the summarized results of the ILO worksheet(s) you completed, and your brief reflections on the significance of these results for your own instruction, for the work of the Curriculum Committee in overseeing the GE curriculum, and for faculty development. You are welcome to submit the report as soon as you have finished grading the relevant student work, or to wait until you have submitted semester grades and have had the opportunity to consider your results in the context of the course as a whole. Please submit your report no later than two weeks after the due date for course grades for the term in which your course was offered.
Only IR&E staff and student research assistants will read the reports prepared by individual instructors, although instructors are welcome to share their own reports with other colleagues. Additional information about plans for summarizing findings, and the anticipated uses of results for faculty members and committees, departments, and other groups is posted on the GE assessment project website.
If you have any questions about any aspect of this project, please contact IR&E or the Assessment Subcommittee. Thank you for your thoughtful participation.