Proposed Core Curriculum Assessment Plan

11-4-2019

Carol Emmons and Greg Pulliam

Beginning in the Spring of 2020, we will assess one of the four UGSC-passed Core Curriculum Goals per semester, so that all four goals will be assessed within two years, and each will continue to be reassessed every four regular semesters.

Each Core Curriculum Goal consists of 2-3 specific objectives which assessment will focus on.

The Chair of the Undergraduate Studies Committee (UGSC) (or a nominated and confirmed member of the UGSC) will chair a three-person Assessment Committee (AC) to run each semester’s assessment. The UGSC chair will nominate the other two members in consultation with the affected colleges’ deans, and the UGSC will confirm them.

· One of the two other members of the AC must come from a college which provides courses in which the goals are being assessed;

· The third member must come from a college which does not provide these courses.

The AC will use the curriculum map to select up to three courses (enough to get a returned sample of 40) from the map which supports the goal being assessed.

· The committee will then consult with the instructors of those courses to discover which assignments for the courses would be the best indicators of whether or not students are achieving the component parts of the learning goal.

· The instructors will then need to adapt the assignment for the course site in Blackboard and align the assignment with the appropriate learning goal. Students will need to submit their work for this assignment in Blackboard.

The Assessment Director will configure the Outcomes part of Blackboard with information about the course, learning goal, rubric to be used to evaluate the student artifacts. 

· This will cause the submitted assignments to be copied to the Outcomes part of Blackboard.

· When all of the artifacts have been assembled in this location, the AC members will view and assign a score to each of the 40 items on a rubric designed to evaluate students’ level of performance on each of several performance indicators for each of the component parts of the learning goal—a score of:

o 1 if the artifact fails to meet the objective;

o 2 if the artifact meets the objective;

o 3 if the artifact exceeds the objective.

· This scoring will be done directly in Blackboard.

The members’ scores on each performance indicator will be aggregated across students and the marginal distributions reported to the UGSC, and UFC and the Assessment Director.