Deb and Hans talked about what we might do to help them with Gen. Educ. Assessment. Oral communication, Writing, and the Values course seem simpler to assess than Civ. How does one set a consistent and meaningful bar for assessing students' sense of historical perspective and context? Greg reiterated that we need to ask questions that will point us towards the areas that could use some improvement. Hans and Deb agreed that it would be helpful for Assessment Council members to run focus groups as well as do sampling from Civ. essays.
In discussing the GST faculty's perception of (and participation in) GST assessment, we agreed that simplicity of measures is the key to faculty cooperation in Assessment: less is more.
Greg asked for our intuitive responses to the idea of bringing in an outside speaker/facilitator to help us learn to more effectively implement measures such as course-embedded assessment and portfolios. Consensus seemed to be that there's a pretty negative community perception of bringing in experts and "forcing" faculty to listen to them. Deb suggested instead targeting specific influential and energetic individuals in each department to send away to conferences, so that they could bring new expertise back to each department.
We raised the possibility of using GEG to help with Gen. Educ. Assessment.
We discussed regional and national workshop/conference opportunities in the summer and the coming year.
