assessment of general education

Assessment of General EducationAuthor(s): Tanya FurmanSource: The Journal of General Education, Vol. 62, No. 2-3 (2013), pp. 129-136Published by: Penn State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jgeneeduc.62.2-3.0129 .

Accessed: 08/10/2013 10:59

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Penn State University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journalof General Education.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 129.68.65.223 on Tue, 8 Oct 2013 10:59:17 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=psup

http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jgeneeduc.62.2-3.0129?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


The Journal of General Education: A Curricular Commons of the Humanities and Sciences, Vol. 62, Nos. 2–3, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pa.

abstractThe assessment of general education is often approached through broad surveys or standardized instruments that fail to capture the learning goals most faculty members desire for this portion of the curriculum. The challenge in remedy-ing this situation lies, first, in defining general education in meaningful ways that can be both articulated and measured and, second, in engaging deeply the faculty members whose own intellectual abilities cut across disciplinary boundar-ies to address the learning that lies at the heart of general education.

The assessment of student learning, by which I mean the mastery of intellectual material and both cognitive and noncognitive skills, is moving nationally toward a higher level of importance and recognition. Kuh and Ikenberry (2009) report that most colleges and universities approach assess-ment with a combination of tools and approaches; fully two-thirds of insti-tutions employ three or more approaches, including nationally standardized tests or surveys, locally developed surveys, and authentic assessments such as portfolios and assignment-based rubrics. This multifaceted ascent involves aspects of accountability to stakeholders (e.g., parents, legislative funders), as well as broad justification for the value of course-based college learning in the domain between online lectures and co-curricular activities. Each of the regional accrediting bodies echoes the sentiment of the Department of Education that assessment shall be carried out in colleges and universities for both baccalaureate degree programs and general education.

Assessment of GenerAl

educAtion

tanya furman

JGE 62.2-3_05_Furman.indd 129 24/07/13 10:44 AM



130 tanya furman

It is important to distinguish the consistent complementary roles of account-ability, which focuses on parameters such as time to graduation, tuition, fees, and other institutional variables largely outside of direct faculty control, and learning outcomes assessment, which falls squarely within the domain of instruction and student programming both inside and outside of the classroom. The financial bur-den of obtaining a college degree is woven through both of these elements, as it provokes the question being asked around family dinner tables, think tanks, and boardrooms nationwide: “How do we know what students gain through a college education?” Learning outcomes assessment is the critical avenue to answering this question, but the road itself presents many challenges.

The assessment of baccalaureate learning within a major discipline falls natu-rally to the faculty members of that discipline who can, with prompting and support, articulate the abilities and knowledge that their graduates should possess. Faculty members are rather easy to assemble as they cluster naturally in groups of disciplin-ary or subdisciplinary specialization and speak a common language of mastery and conceptual understanding. Appreciable headway can be made in this arena, if only by appealing to disciplinary chauvinism and the quest to define what makes each group special relative to all others. Although consensus around implementing a meaningful assessment plan may take some time, the establishment of measurable learning objectives can often be accomplished with only a handful of meetings and conversations. I have spent the better portion of the past few years engaged in such meetings and have seen how meaningful progress—and wise assessment of student learning—can occur readily across a wide range of disciplines.

Transferring this approach to the general education curriculum has proved to be more problematic. The challenge in assessing general education lies first and foremost in the difficulty that surrounds defining the purpose of this portion of the curriculum. General education is a term widely used to describe university requirements that fall outside of a student’s profes-sional or disciplinary concentration. This domain is frequently cited as the home for a well-rounded education that nurtures skills in communication, numeracy, and critical thinking. Many modern universities state the pur-pose of their general education curricula in terms of exposure to, familiarity with, and appreciation for a broad suite of disciplinary groups, in addition to rather vaguely worded references to global understanding, citizenship, civic engagement, and diversity. These goals are laudable but do not lend them-selves readily to measurement. In this contribution I attempt to bridge the chasm between the assessment of baccalaureate programs and that of general education by calling upon every institution’s faculty members to increase their engagement with the holistic education of our nation’s young people. To that end, I share my own perspectives on avenues to the assessment of




Assessment of General Education 131

general education that I have found rise to the challenges inherent in this important domain.

defining General education

There is no uniform definition of general education. It is not my purpose here to describe the context and history of general education in the United States, so what follows is a brief synthesis from Cohen (2013) that is biased toward my own ideals. For many years, general education was intended to provide students not with a vague concept of menu-based breadth but with an explicit grounding in the liberal arts. John Stuart Mill (1869) suggested that we look at “national educa-tion, as being, in truth, the peculiar training of a citizen, the practical part of the political education of a free people, taking them out of the narrow circle of per-sonal and family selfishness, and accustoming them to the comprehension of joint concerns—habituating them to act from public or semi-public motives, and guide their conduct by aims which unite instead of isolating them from one another” (p. 197). Mill’s work set a foundation for the general education and citizenship programs that emerged in the twentieth century.

As we probe further into the areas proposed by Mill, three significant and not unrelated areas of study emerge. These are (1) the ability to think critically, (2) the ability to express one’s views with clarity, and (3) the capacity to seek out and grapple with the ideas, views, intellectual approaches, and perspectives of individu-als who are different from oneself. It is this third component of general education that proves most elusive in both curriculum design and assessment. “The dominant pedagogical aim,” wrote democracy and law philosopher Ronald Dworkin in 2006, “must be to instill some sense of the complexity of these issues, some understand-ing of positions different from those the students are likely to find at home or among friends, and some idea of what a conscientious and respectful argument over these issues might be like” (p. 149). In the academy we recognize that purpose-ful engagement with the common breadth requirements of general education—be they natural science, art, humanities, diversity, cultural inquiry, or a host of other categories—can enable students to embrace complexity and develop the rigor of analytical thought that indeed enables a democratic citizenry to be well informed (Cohen, 2013). The challenge is to ensure that we ask our students to be purpose-ful, that we provide them with opportunities to succeed in this endeavor, and that we then assess the degree to which we have together achieved some modicum of success.

A majority of colleges and universities in the United States offer general education that falls short of contextual grounding and intellectual critical think-ing. Often, the general education curriculum is both too broad and too narrow




132 tanya furman

and reflects a loosely constrained menu of course choices. It comprises a broad array of lower-division introductory courses that meander across wide swaths of perspective and content. It is too narrow in that general education courses often encompass restricted faculty interests, satisfy departmental goals of filling seats to justify otherwise underenrolled elective courses, or are taught as elementary disciplinary classes rather than as integrative challenges that inspire students to think across disciplines and perspectives. Advocates of this approach maintain that in addition to developing a well-rounded student who is familiar with mul-tiple ways of knowing and pursuing knowledge, the wide array of class choices enables students to discover and engage with new and unanticipated disciplin-ary areas. While both of these suggestions may indeed be correct, I have seen no published evidence—no assessment of student learning—that such unrestricted breadth assists students in their mastery of general education goals that include critical thinking and self-expression, building a foundation sufficient to support sustained learning after college, or improved decision making in the face of the natural complexity of modern life.

standardized Assessment of General education

The assessment of general education is at present a complex multimillion- dollar industry. Three broad groups of actors have defined the primary landscape of assessment tools and frameworks: experts in standardized testing of content (e.g., College Board, Educational Testing Service), demographic and attitudinal surveyors (e.g., National Survey of Student Engagement, Cooperative Institutional Research Program), and associations of institutions (e.g., American Association of State Colleges and Universities, Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities) that seek ways to contextualize the data for diverse internal and external audiences. Together, these groups provide numerous publications, webinars, and conferences that promote dialogue around the assessment of key facets of general education. At the same time, these broad efforts to standardize testing risk shortchanging sig-nificant and sorely needed dialogue among the faculty members, students, and administrative leaders on individual campuses nationwide.

Institutions seeking to survey their students for attitudinal or behav-ioral characteristics using instruments such as the National Survey of Student Engagement or Cooperative Institutional Research Program must deal with the increasing “survey fatigue” of undergraduates, for whom the luster of having their opinion asked has long since faded, and hence the reality that the students who respond to lengthy electronic surveys are not representative of the whole population. These surveys (my examples are not intended to be exclusionary) often yield significant snapshots of the institution and its student body and





can provide insight into student involvement in high-impact practices such as internships and study abroad experiences as well as perceptions of time spent studying and interacting with peers. This information is important but does not address student mastery of critical thinking, deal with clear expression, or enable measurement of the degree to which students truly learn from their experiences in ways that help them grow as individuals.

Insight into critical thinking and self-expression can be obtained through intensive exams such as the Collegiate Learning Assessment (developed by the Council for Aid to Education), the ets Proficiency Profile (developed by the Educational Testing Service), and the Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency (from the American College Testing Program). Unlike Web-based attitudinal and self-report learning surveys, these examinations use a constructed-response approach to assessing critical thinking and written communication. The examinations are typically offered outside of scheduled classes, and individual students are commonly incentivized to encourage them to perform well. The unit of analysis for these examinations is typically the institution and not the student; exam scores are aggregated with the goal of comparing freshmen and senior undergraduates to those at peer or aspirational institutions and are highly correlated with institutionally averaged sat scores. Researchers such as Arum and Roksa (2010) have worked to increase the granularity of the exam results, but their approach and findings are not without controversy. The primary weakness of these examinations in the context of general education is that neither students nor faculty members are accountable individually for attaining institutional learning objectives: the summative and aggregated data provide an institutional snapshot but do not foster the taking of responsibility for student intellectual growth.

The landscape is thus a patchwork of options, often with little or no coherence to the general education goals espoused above. I fear that even the greatest institutional leader would be sorely challenged to rally his or her faculty around a vague call to raise a single aggregated numerical indica-tor of student performance. More troubling yet is the recognition that the results of most standardized assessment tests or surveys provide an institu-tional demographic datum but precious little to those in the academy who seek to improve student learning on the basis of the results, particularly in the attainment of general education goals. A recent and very positive addition to this field is the Critical Thinking Assessment Test (cat, from researchers at Tennessee Tech University), which focuses on assessing critical thinking and writing through real-world problem solving and can be offered as an in-class assignment. The challenge to administering this examination is indeed its greatest strength: all written work is scored on campus by members of the teaching faculty. It is to this theme that I will return below.




134 tanya furman

Valuable counsel on Assessment

Among the many organizations actively promoting one or more methods of assess-ment, two groups stand out in my mind; others may be of the same caliber, but these are my personal preferences. The National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment has been a leader in promoting robust and thoughtful assessment of student learning. Its goal is “to discover and disseminate ways that academic pro-grams and institutions can productively use assessment data internally to inform and strengthen undergraduate education, and externally to communicate with policy makers, families and other stakeholders” (www.learningoutcomeassessment.org). Its resources include numerous case studies of institutional efforts as well as targeted occasional review papers and state-of-the-art synthesis documents.

In 2005 the Association of American Colleges and Universities developed Liberal Education and America’s Promise, a national advocacy and research initiative that champions the importance of a twenty-first-century liberal edu-cation (www.aacu.org/leap/). Its work on the assessment of the cognitive and noncognitive objectives commonly associated with general education includes thoughtful definitions of learning outcomes as well as detailed rubrics for evalu-ating student mastery and achievement. As with the cat, substantial faculty effort is required to determine the degree of student mastery in these areas. To put it simply: the meaningful assessment of high-level learning requires deep intellectual engagement by the evaluator.

The important role of the academic faculty in carrying out meaningful assessment at the individual or institutional level has been championed by, for example, Banta, Griffin, Flateby, and Kahn (2009) and Suskie (2009). When considering general education it is precisely this issue that proves problematic: At many institutions, including perhaps all of the large public research universities that educate the majority of our nation’s youth, there are general education courses with a highly distributed and frequently unen-gaged faculty, and collectively they make up a general education curriculum that is at best poorly defined. The development of thoughtful and realistic general education learning outcomes assessment metrics and procedures thus fundamentally depends on the empowerment and recognition of both a cur-riculum and a faculty for general education.

Assessing General education for real

The first meaningful step toward assessing student learning in general educa-tion is to take stock of the nature of the institutional curriculum and the degree to which it is valued. As with any baccalaureate degree, successful curricular





implementation can occur only if the students and faculty members arrive at a common page and shared understanding of the purpose of the courses. In most institutions, the majority of students and faculty members are unable to articulate the value of general education courses and requirements. Research conducted at my own institution indicates that instructors of lower-division general education courses are likely to be employed on annual or part-time contracts and are typically unaware of the goals of the general education cur-riculum adopted by the Faculty Senate. Their engagement in the process, so critical to student success, must be fostered if we hope to measure and improve student attainment of general education learning objectives. I thus encour-age those individuals like myself, who have both a deep commitment to gen-eral education and an institutional role in learning outcomes assessment, to begin by exploring the ways in which students, advisers, administrators, and the instructional faculty talk about the goals, courses, and outcomes of gen-eral education. A document produced following a series of guided conversa-tions with these stakeholders can serve as a powerful benchmark against which meaningful assessment may take place, recognizing that we cannot measure what we cannot define and that we do not define that which we do not value.

In my role as coordinator of my institution’s baccalaureate and general educa-tion assessment efforts, I annually review the learning objectives, assessment data collection plans, and findings for well over 150 degree programs. The most com-mon finding at the departmental level is that the senior undergraduate students do not think critically, write clearly, or integrate complex or divergent perspectives into their work to the degree expected by the disciplinary faculty. I contend that the three domains of general education identified at the outset of this essay can and should be assessed within the context of a coherent curriculum that encompasses both general and disciplinary education. Interestingly, the faculty members at my insti-tution who scored cat exams during our pilot implementation not only enjoyed the opportunity to evaluate students’ work but recognized that the assignments in their own courses did not promote the type of critical and analytical thinking and expression that they value and strive to encourage. In other words, the student-level assessment allowed for a rich self-assessment for the participating faculty members. With encouragement to follow through in creating and deploying more rigorous assignments, these faculty members can move general education from a tragedy of the commons toward a shared and valued vision of student learning.

Getting General education right

Regardless of the model that an institution chooses to implement general education, it is essential to cultivate and align shared perspectives of its purpose




136 tanya furman

among the faculty and the students. Many committed and otherwise highly engaged faculty members are unclear on the relevance of this aspect of the cur-riculum, often because they have played no role in its articulation. It is expected that students will need mentoring and support in order to attain the values of the institution, and that scaffolding can only be accomplished by the faculty members with whom they engage on a daily basis.

A strong general education curriculum can and should enable students to develop the intellectual capacity to make principled and informed decisions and choices in the many realms of their life that lie ahead after college. Just as a disci-plinary course of study involves the shared efforts of faculty members from several perspectives and specialties who work together to create a mosaic of meaning from its disparate parts, so, too, must a general education curriculum reflect the shared work of committed individual faculty members. Until such a consensus is achieved and valued, the assessment of its products will be shallow and unenlightened. Just as we encourage students to discover themselves through learning to engage deeply with those who are from other walks of life, be that walk identified in terms of religion, race, socioeconomic status, disciplinary pursuit, or lifestyle, so must we as faculty members take that same journey. The isolated educator or researcher who interacts only with like-minded colleagues in his or her subfield is unlikely to model the practices and values that we hope to instill in students through general education. For that reason, we must celebrate the faculty members who are broadly interactive across institutional silos and recognize their contributions to general education. Empowering these individuals to define and then assess the outcomes of general education leads us to a meaningful understanding of student learning.

references

Arum, R., & Roksa, J. (2010). Academically adrift: Limited learning on college campuses. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Banta, T. W., Griffin, M., Flateby, T. L., & Kahn, S. (2009). Three promising alternatives for assessing college students’ knowledge and skills. Retrieved from www.bhsu.edu/Portals/0/facultystaff/assessment/Alternatives_000.pdf.

Cohen, J. (2013). The general education landscape. Journal of General Education, 62, x–xii.Dworkin, R. (2006). Is democracy possible here? Princeton: Princeton University Press.Kuh, G., & Ikenberry, S. (2009). More than you think, less than we need: Learning outcomes

assessment in American higher education. Urbana: University of Illinois and Indiana University, National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment.

Mill, J. S. (1869). On liberty. London: J. W. Parker and Son.Suskie, L. (2009). Assessing student learning: A common sense guide (2nd ed.). San Francisco:

Jossey-Bass.




assessment of general education

Documents