Learning Outcome 2

Develop intellectual and practical skills across the curriculum, including inquiry and analysis, critical and creative thinking, problem solving, written and oral communication, information literacy, technological competence, and collaborative learning. 

Proficiency will be demonstrated across the curriculum through critical analysis of proffered information, well-reasoned solutions to problems or inferences drawn from evidence, effective written and oral communication, and satisfactory outcomes of group projects.

2022-2023 University-Wide results

Summary of Pilot

The subcommittee drew from two collaborative spaces for the assessment pilot. 

• • Invite and codesign with GER faculty for Outcome 2 rubric and assignment

  • Score and identify changes for the August rollout

We generated the following questions to frame this report:

Are the rubric and assignment connected to the Learning Outcome helping us collaborate in generative and meaningful ways? 

• YES

What moments in the assessment this year were challenging?  

• Faculty Senate Leadership relayed faculty concerns about our automated system (data management) and communications to GER faculty. We continue to improve and adapt our process and are committed to being inclusive of collaboration.  This year we are committed to providing an overview at the first faculty senate meeting of the year and sharing our LO1 final report to be included in the December 2021 meeting.

What helps us ensure more engaged faculty participation for learning?

• Our design for Learning Outcome 2 differs from last year because we added a way for faculty to participate through the DIY process. We will report on how many faculty took this option in comparison to the default option where faculty are provided a good-to-go assignment to share directly with students.

What should we do differently or stress as we scale the process in August?

• To support DIY participation, we will provide a session for faculty to design their own critical thinking assignment with  resource

Narrative of 2020-2021 General Education Assessment Outcome 2 Pilot

PEOPLE, PARTS, and PLACES: 5 Faculty from the General Education Requirements Committee met in November 2020 to design both a rubric and a signature assignment for Learning Outcome 2. The work was captured on a google doc available here. The signature assignment asks students to write a justification of a choice they made in the course. This choice-making can occur through either the student selecting an assignment from the course and writing a justification of why that assignment was chosen to demonstrate critical thinking or the instructor designs a problem-based scenario positioning the student to make a choice. Either option will result in the student submitting a justification for the assessment process. Students enrolled in an online team-taught section of Writing 111X, an online Art History  200X,  and a small set of required mathematics courses were assigned a version of the signature assignment in Spring 2021. At a 2 hour virtual workshop July 22, the retreat faculty team reviewed each assignment and discussed a sample set; this process is known as "norming. The work is made available through this google doc. Independently, this team then analyzed 15 random samples and tabulated their scores. In late July, we scheduled a socially distanced retreat to determine if our design met our primary goal: The rubric and signature assignment were found on July 23 to need revision for university-wide use in fall 2021. 

PEOPLE and PRODUCTS: This report reflects fewer General Education courses than anticipated initially. COVID-19 was still interrupting how teaching and learning happened, and each instructor adapted the signature assignment to fit their communication delivery mode, resulting in a range of student samples to the assignment. Future results will use a form designed by or approved by an eCampus designer. However, we will simplify the assignment design by asking faculty to select option 1 or option 2 for their course of students. Both options will result in a student sample that can be scored by our rubric.

PROCESSES and PURPOSES: At the retreat, we affirmed the strength of our assignment. We noticed how it can elicit from some students technical responses which are dependent on the audience knowing the context of the question. That is, some answers communicated a simple answer without a full justification if the instructor provided the critical thinking scenario.  We agreed that offering more support to faculty and formalizing the two options in participating can address this problem. The importance of having students submit through a provided URL with a pre-filled course number remains a cornerstone of our system. This feature allows us to easily share the responses after the semester is over with the instructor for their own improvement. In this way, we do not need to learn the scenario for our purposes, we only need to collect the justification from the students.

PROCESSES AND PEOPLE: Our design principle is to limit as much as possible the additional communication to individual faculty or students. We agreed to use as much automation as possible and to rely on email to trigger the process. We reached out and included in our retreat two eCampus collaborators. Thank you Nathan Feemster and Madara Mason. We also agreed and to continue this process of coming together and reflecting on the big ideas behind General Education. The process should be as automated as possible in terms of the procedures for students and General Education faculty. 

POWER and PEOPLE:  The design of Learning Outcome 2 invites faculty members to apply their own way of teaching this outcome. We encourage these signature assignments to be valued as complete/incomplete work. We suggest students should automatically receive either full points once they have turned in their response on time or no points because the assignment is ignored, late, or missing. Transparency in grading practice for all parties and helps faculty and students stay focused on acknowledging the work that goes into participating in a healthy and thriving learning ecology.

FUTURE: To prepare for the scaling of Learning Outcome 2 in the fall,  To follow our logic, you can read our agenda of the retreat.