Assessment: Faculty Advising Day
11:00-11:30,
Monday, Jan. 7th, 2002
The following is information shared at the Faculty
meeting Monday, Jan. 7, 2002 on required information to be included in all
course syllabi for the General Education program.
1. For those courses submitted by various disciplines, accepted by the General Education Subcommittee, and approved by the Academic Affairs Committee, those General Education goals that each course is supposed to cover, as was proposed in its course proposal, would need to be expressed in the course syllabus. In other words, course objectives and activities would need to reflect those General Education goals. (How to express those goals is the individual instructor’s choice. Some examples of expressing those General Education goals could be in a matrix format (as is used often in Nursing and Education courses); or identify each course objective with corresponding General Education goal(s), or describe them. Whatever way you choose, we need to make sure that we share and communicate such information with students so that they know what they are expected of accomplishing in completing a General Education course.)
2. Appropriate evaluation activities need to be designed and implemented to effectively assess how those goals are being met through student academic performance. Methods and practices of such evaluation activities are determined by individual instructors teaching those courses. The Assessment Committee will be asking for samples of such evaluation activities/products (for instance, writing samples from those courses that claim to cover communication skills in writing) that will show students’ academic performance in relation to appropriate General Education goals.
The nine General Education goals are described on pages 51-52 of the Catalog. A matrix of General Education courses with their specific General Education goals is also available from each School representative for Assessment and School Chairpersons. A copy of this matrix was both sent through e-mail and campus mail at the end of Fall term to each instructor teaching General Education courses.
This assessment information will be important not only as part of the documentation process for the NCA re-accreditation process, but also as part of the valuable information to evaluate this transition General Education program in the near future.