Gen Ed Assessment Cycle & OAC

History

The current general education curriculum was designed by faculty in the late 1990s to address the needs of graduates entering and leaving college at the turn of the 21st century. It was forward looking and assured a high-quality and broad education in the liberal arts and sciences, together with cultivation of important skills including oral and written communication, multicultural awareness, and information literacy. Now that we are well into the second decade of the 21st century, and in the context of rapidly-changing knowledge and global environments, the faculty last year reviewed the general education curriculum and made revisions they judged necessary both to support your success as citizens of this changing world and, additionally, to articulate and document your learning. The revisions anchor the general education curriculum in essential learning outcomes – statements of what students should know and be able to do when they complete the requirement. The faculty voted to approve the revisions in October of 2013 and, since that time, have been making changes in courses in preparation for implementing the new requirements which began in fall 2014.  Along with changing to an outcomes-based General Education curriculum came the need for the Outcomes Assessment Committee (OAC) to design and approve learning assessment rubrics and processes closely aligned to the new curriculum.   In addition to developing and approving new rubrics for this process, the OAC also developed a sampling strategy designed to balance faculty and departmental work load while still ensuring statistically valid sample sizes. In turn, this sampling strategy is used to guide the yearly GE assessment sampling distributions for use by programs.

Due to the time it takes for designing and approving all new rubrics, a transition year was approved for AY 2014-15 for continuing assessment data collection so that only approved courses within the model would be used for the annual assessment sampling rotation for data collection. A new Four-Year Sampling Rotation was implemented beginning in AY 2015-16 as courses were approved for key General Education student learning outcomes to be assessed.  With more courses approved to begin assessing these General Education student learning outcomes in AY 2016-17, a New Four-Year Sampling Rotation was approved by the Outcomes Assessment Committee (OAC) and implemented for AY 2016-17. The AY 19-23 Sampling Rotation can be found here[BROKEN LINK].

Once the OAC receives the GE data from different programs, members of the OAC collate and generate yearly summaries of GE assessment data for each of the areas of GE assessment. This data and yearly summaries are posted to Nuventive Improve and this website.

In order to continue to show improvement based on annual learning results, discussions with faculty are being conducted not only in curriculum meetings where all department chairs are represented but in a new discussion forum held during University Days in August and January of each academic year. Click here to see the Processes and Procedures of General Education Learning Outcomes Assessment.