IGEA Communication 2/20/02 Meeting Statements

PROJECT EVALUATION

Interdisciplinary Gen Ed Outcomes Assessment Project

Faculty Reflection and Evaluation

Compiled Responses (six faculty responding)

1. 
   What were the benefits of participating in the IGEA Project?
   

• 
  I got concrete, tangible, rubrics that I am using and revising as a result of my participation in this project. The discipline of coming to meetings and being required to develop products to present at the meetings helped me focus on what exactly I want students to show me in the assignments I ask them to do. Talking to other faculty about their assignments and their rubrics influenced my thinking about my own assignments.
  

• 
  Meeting with colleagues to discuss pedagogy. Seeing how other disciplines approach student work.
  

• 
  The opportunity to see other approaches to classroom assignments and discuss possible applications of the outcomes.
  

• 
  It gave me a greater understanding of the Gen Ed. Requirements and other instructors’ approaches to meeting them within assignments.
  

• 
  Participating in this project had many benefits. I was given the opportunity to work closely with master teachers that mentored me in my first quarters at SCC. Although I did have prior knowledge about assessment tools and how they should be utilized to improve the curriculum and not only to assess student’s knowledge, this opportunity was excellent. I was able to change theory into practice and utilize the knowledge that I had before. The notebooks being compiled will be very beneficial to future instructors that come to SCC.
  

• 
  I gained valuable pedagogical information from my involvement with this project. The most significant insights came from sharing with my colleagues ways to assess—that is, assessment in general. We discussed rubrics, our philosophy about grading, how our relationship with the students affect assessment and our assignments. Seeing what other professors do in the classroom, hearing their reasoning behind the merits of their assignments, and simply “talking pedagogy” was enlightening, rewarding, and enjoyable. It is what college-level “meetings” should be!
  

• 
  This was a wonderful chance to learn about outcomes, assignments and grading from other instructors. I'm always going to use a rubric in the future and I suspect it will force me to be more clear about what I expect from assignments.
  

• 
  I've been quick to espouse "multiculturalism," but I haven't taught a credit course at SCC and hadn't thought much about how to interpret and achieve the multicultural outcomes. Now I'm more aware of the goal’s enormity and of its applicability to everyone on campus, not just students. Yet thoughtfulness is needed lest in our good intentions we bring about alienation instead of understanding; the issues are highly personal and can be highly threatening. Perhaps alienating a few is inevitable.
  

2. 
   Did participating on this project cause you to think differently about the Gen Ed outcomes or the outcome you worked on in particular? If so, how?
   

• 
  I have been working on outcomes assessment for more than 15 years. Specifically, I was on the team that developed the General Education Outcomes we have now. I am more than familiar with every word, every nuance, and every comma in the GenEd outcomes. I wouldn’t have expected that I could gain more knowledge and skills in this area. However, I did gain useful insight into how others perceive the sentences we wrote in the GenEd outcomes.
  

• 
  It made me look at the outcomes more closely.
  

• 
  In some ways I think I broadened my view of what applies to the outcomes
  

• 
  Yes, I feel that I understand the information literacy requirement as a whole, and by extension can understand the other requirements. I have a greater understanding of how I can give my students, who are pre-college, the skills to be able to meet these requirements in the future. Additionally, I am more committed to addressing the requirements in my own courses.
  

• 
  Yes, participating in this project has definitely affected my thoughts on how the Gen Ed Outcomes can be successfully integrated into my curriculum. As a first year instructor, I feel that I was given the chance to work very closely with the Gen Ed Outcomes and with colleagues committed to their implementation, which will directly impact how they are utilized in my lessons. In addition, the assessment tools created were very helpful in making my first year’s courses run smoother for myself and my students, with clear expectations for all.
  

• 
  Yes, It caused me to question the general education outcomes! I am still unclear about the intentions of the outcome. I think the outcomes are what we want the students to be able to demonstrate upon leaving SCC; however, they seemed to be used more as a standard for writing Master Course Outlines and less as a standard for assessing the students learning. Are we assessing the outcome? How do we know? More importantly, my experience with the Communication outcome is that the outcome is written for a particular course (namely ENG 101 with a little cultural sensitivity rolled in). The outcome is narrowly defined making the task of fitting the outcome difficult if it doesn’t fit all parts of it. See Pam’s notes from our meetings for a more complete description of our “beefs” with the outcome. My biggest pet-peeve is using “verbally” to mean “orally”. They mean markedly different things (written forms are verbal!) and this is problematic for a gen. Ed. Outcome.
  

3. 
   How does this project benefit the college as a whole (or not)?
   

• 
  I see several key benefits to this project:
  

1. 
   It provides compensation for faculty to do useful work, which they would otherwise due for free.
   
2. 
   It makes a space for faculty to talk with other faculty about their work
   
3. 
   It keeps outcomes assessment foregrounded, which is a difficult task given all the demands on faculty time.
   

• 
  It brings people together to discuss teaching. Something the college distinctly lacks
  

• 
  It allows those who are interested to see examples of how the standards can be applied in specific class settings.
  

• 
  It creates a body of knowledge and understanding shared by a group – albeit small - who, hopefully, can help start a process of the whole campus of becoming more familiar and committed to the Gen Ed Requirements.
  

• 
  This project, I feel, is very beneficial to SCC in several ways. On one level it allowed colleagues from different disciplines to come together and collaborate and dialogue around the topic of assessment and it’s value in our college courses. On another level this project allowed for myself to become more confident in the assessment tools that am using in my classroom and more fully understand the process that occurs when assessing student work. Finally, in the specific Gen Ed Outcome that I was working on, a deeper understanding of what that needs to look like in our curriculums was communicated. Excellent project all around.
  

• 
  I think this project benefits the college as a whole only if we continue to use it as a tool for reflecting and refining our relationship to the gen. Ed. Outcomes. It benefited me greatly, and I assume it benefited the other participants as well—but to extrapolate out we would need some serious discussion of the outcomes. We would need to revise them; have difficult discussions about the use of MCO’s and to what degree we need to labor over them; we would need to “market” the “books” that document our assignments and encourage faculty to use them. To benefit everyone we should encourage more discussion groups that allow faculty from all disciplines to discuss their assignments and learn from each other. As is, if the “greater college” conveniently “forgets” the work of this project and or, doesn’t want to do the hard work of taking the suggestions seriously, this project will benefit few other than the participants and those who take the time to look at the project books.
  

• 
  Although I realized previously that moving toward the gen ed outcomes is the responsibility of all of us on campus and can’t be left to a few instructors who teach certain courses, I’m now a more emphatic advocate of that point. The more of us take responsibility, the more easily the campus will achieve the outcomes.
  

4. 
   What drawbacks do you see to any aspect of the project?
   

• 
  It’s so hard to carve out the time to meet.
  

• 
  The effort to fit every aspect of student effort into a homogenous, preconceived “outcome”
  

• 
  I’m not sure that the end product will be widely consulted. I am also very concerned about the length of time it has taken to implement the new gen ed standards – with only a few exceptions it seems that the standards are so broad that either everything or nothing can fulfill them. It is almost time for a new revision of the gen ed standards and we have not yet agreed on these.
  

• 
  Unfortunately when some programs and divisions are not well-represented (or represented at all), it can create a sense of divide between the folks who are “in” the group and “out” of the group. I would like to see a college effort to support discussion and understanding of the new requirements. There seems to be a piece missing without that support and element of “promotion.”
  

• 
  The only drawback of the project was the time commitment and attempting to work around so many different schedules. I know that this was a chore for Pam and her hard work is greatly appreciated. There is just so much that needs to be done and very little time to accomplish it all, when everyone could attend the meetings great work was done.
  

• 
  None other than it bringing up much needed work that most will be reluctant to do.
  

• 
  None.
  

5. 
   Were this project to continue, what do you see as the important next steps?
   

• 
  The next step as I see it is one we’ve talked about in our meetings. Combine all the IGEA groups into one meeting, provide simple lunches, and put the group to work developing rubrics that combine as many GenEd outcomes as feasible.
  

• 
  Create a less formal approach that encourages discussion of teaching not of outcomes and assessment.
  

• 
  At some point we need to identify how students will meet these new outcomes on a course level.
  

• 
  An effort to share ideas and bring more people into the discussion, as I’ve suggested above.
  

• 
  I could see the project committee making some recommendations regarding how to successfully implement the Gen Ed Outcomes into the curriculum. There could be internal professional development workshops offered or some way created to share the great information being gathered. I also think that it would be great to get some student work from other discipline areas on campus. I know that was a constant goal of Pam’s.
  

• 
  Involving new teams to discuss their assignments. Revisiting the outcomes and revising them so that they are easier to work with, more reflective of our work and intentions, and reasonable. Educate the campus about assessment.
  

• 
  Somehow expand it to include more faculty in the process of looking at assignments. I'm not suggesting that all instructors spend days on each outcome, but a workshop on each outcome for each instructor would be appropriate in addition to the availability of the notebooks.
  

6. 
   Anything else?
   

• 
  Consider using some assessment money to cater lunches for the meetings. This would go a long way toward building community and commitment. I know it’s a small thing, but it would work.
  

• 
  Not everything is measurable nor should we spend all our effort measuring. The outcomes assessment philosophy is oriented more to political showboating than to student-centered learning.
  

• 
  Pam worked very hard for this project and I certainly hope that something will come of it.
  

• 
  Nope, except: Good job, Pam!
  

• 
  KUDOS to Pam for spearheading this project.--for her hard work and dedication to a cause that seems unsupported. We had a great time in our group. It was supportive, educational, and valuable on all counts.
  

PROJECT FINDINGS

Benefits:

• 
  Participating in IGEA helped the sixteen faculty to integrate assessment of SCC's General Education Outcomes into their courses.
  
• 
  It also helped faculty more deeply understand the outcomes themselves and their relevance to course content. They see more clearly what the Gen Ed Outcomes mean in terms of their students' performance.
  
• 
  It helped faculty to clearly communicate performance expectations to their students resulting in several clear cases of improved student performance of the Gen Ed Outcomes and of specific course outcomes.
  
• 
  This project produced three notebooks ("Good IGEAs"), each containing assignments with assessment rubrics and sample student work that measure student performance of each of three Gen Ed Outcomes: Communication, Multicultural Understanding, and Information Literacy. The notebooks provide a resource for the entire faculty where they can see divers examples of ways to assess the Gen Ed outcomes across the subjects and programs.
  
• 
  The Good IGEAs Notebooks also provide excellent evidence that SCC faculty are assessing the Gen Ed Outcomes across the curriculum.
  
• 
  Faculty who participated reported an increased appreciation of the work of other faculty. They say that seeing how other faculty incorporate the outcomes into their course content and assignments was important for their own work and for understanding what and how others teach.
  
• 
  Participants stated they actually enjoyed coming to IGEA meetings because the topic was student learning. Some expressed the wish that more committee work proceeded from the question, “How does this affect learning and teaching?”
  
• 
  The Good IGEAs notebooks provide a beginning compilation of what student performance/achievement of the Gen Ed outcomes looks like. It could start the campus-wide discussion of how we will provide performance-based evidence that our students have achieved the Gen Ed outcomes.
  

Download 1.37 Mb.

Share with your friends: