Submitting a Course for Approval as General Education Course Under the Fall 2005 Requirements

1. Consider asking the Director of General Education, for notes from our Assessment Workshop which includes example Scoring Rubrics for various competencies. These are not available online, but they can be sent to you in campus mail.
2. Review your course syllabus and select three General Education Goals (also called competencies). Your course must address at least one competency from each of the three areas: A: Communication, B: Reasoned Judgment, and C: Social and Personal Responsibility. We recognize that your course may address more than three, but until we gain experience with the assessment process, we encourage you to limit yourself to three competencies.
3. For each goal (competency), write one or at most two measurable learning outcomes. A learning outcome is a clear, concise statement that describes how a student can demonstrate their mastery of the competency in your course. They describe observable, measurable behaviors. Some examples follow.
• Goal/Competency: A: Communication, Information Technology Competence - using modern information technology to retrieve and transmit information
• Learning Outcome: Students can locate appropriate information sources by searching electronic databases [1].
• Goal/Competency: B: Reasoned Judgment, Scientific thinking - understanding and applying the scientific method
• Learning Outcome: Students can analyze experimental results and draw reasonable conclusions from them [1].
• Goal/Competency: C: Social and Personal Responsibility, Social Equality - understanding and questioning the social, political, economic and historical conditions that construct diversity and inequality
• Learning Outcome: Students can provide counseling services to people who are different from themselves in gender, age, ethnicity, culture, sexual orientation, or other significant characteristics [1].

A well-written learning outcome states what students can do. Use active voice.

For each learning outcome, give a scoring rubric. "A scoring rubric is an explicit scheme for classifying student products or behaviors into categories that vary along a continuum"[2]. Scoring rubrics come in various forms, but most are one- or two- dimensional. Several examples are given in the scoring rubrics compilation mentioned in Step 1. Along with the scoring rubric, indicate the piece or pieces of work that students produce in your class that the rubric can be used on.

4. What to deliver to the General Education Committee (please send electronic copies to the Director):

• The Course Syllabus: If there are multiple sections of the course, submit a representative syllabus. If necessary, submit all syllabi for a course with multiple sections. At a minimum, The syllabus should explicitly state that the course satisfies a general education requirement, and it should state the three general education competencies that the course addresses. Give the same description of each competency as found in the General Education Goals.
• Competency-Outcomes-Rubrics Statement: In a separate document, (or alternatively, as part of your syllabus) state each general education competency that you are addressing again. Following each competency, give the class-specific, observable learning outcome(s) that can be measured to determine the degree to which students have mastered the competency. Following this, for each outcome give the scoring rubric that can be applied to student work to measure mastery of the outcome. Please note that your assessment should be embedded. That is, the scoring rubric should be applicable to artifacts that students are already producing for your course. We are not asking you (or your students) to generate work in addition to what is ordinarily required in your class.

Notes:

1. We strongly encourage sharing the rubrics with students and using them in classes regularly. We anticipate that the rubrics provided to the students will be modified to reflect specific assignment expectations. 
2. Additional Help: If you would like, Lori Allen, Jeff Alexander or Kimberly Kelley will review a draft of your submission before sending it to the General Education Committee.
3. Additional resources on assessment are available in the Teaching and Learning Center in Wyllie:

• Allen, M. J. (2004). Assessing Academic Programs in Higher Education, Bolton: Anker Publishing Co.
• Angelo and Cross (1993). Classroom Assessment, San Francisco: Jossey Bass.
• Walvoord and Anderson (1998). Effective Grading, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

1. Example outcomes are from: Allen, M. J. (2004). Assessing Academic Programs in Higher Education, Bolton: Anker Publishing Co., p. 30.
2. Allen, M. J. (2004). Assessing Academic Programs in Higher Education, Bolton: Anker Publishing Co., p. 138.