Article,
Where Learning and Assessment Meet
Assessment Update, 21 (2): 5--7 (2009)
DOI: 10.1002/au.212
Abstract
The current general education program at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, which was initiated in the mid-1990s, represents a much more prescriptive curriculum than the one prior to that time, when students were allowed to choose from a wide variety of courses. In 1999, three faculty members from the Department of Languages and Literatures were recruited to develop the procedures and instruments necessary to evaluate a set of papers from the World of Ideas (WOI) course--papers that were assigned by all instructors as the culminating project for the class and were 1,500-2,500 words in length. They developed a rubric to address three criteria--thinking, voice, and literacy--which were articulated in such a way as to link directly back to three of their general education outcomes. Over the next three years, additional sets of papers were scored. Their results were not widely embraced on campus until several years into the project, when there was more discussion about the state of student writing on campus and action taken by some departments, most notably, the History Department. The authors describe this case as an example of an assessment procedure that was not an add-on but an integral part of learning in the classroom.
Tags
- curriculum,
- era-not-ranked,
- evaluation,
- general-education,
- higher-education,
- outcomes,
- scoring-rubrics,
- writing
