Academic Quality Improvement Program - General Education AQIP Report
September 14th, 2004
AQIP Action Project Update
1. Describe the past year's accomplishments and the current status of this Action Project.
The 2003/04 academic term was devoted to the implementation of the new general education.
In Fall 2003, the Director of General Education and Director of Faculty Development in consultation with the Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs appointed a collaborative convener for each component of the new Augsburg Core Curriculum (see list below). Each was charged to convene a faculty (or faculty/staff/student) collaborative to work on these components:
- Augsburg Experience
- Augsburg Seminar/First Year Collaborative
- Effective Writing/Many Voices Project
- Engaging Minneapolis
- Foundations of Fitness
- Infusing Diversity
- Keystone Course
- Liberal Arts Foundations: Fine Arts; Humanities; Natural Sciences and Mathematics; Social and Behavioral Sciences
- Modern Language
- Search for Meaning
The collaboratives were charged to:
1. Define course-level and component-level student learning outcomes. Designing at the component level means that agreements about student learning goals are produced by faculty with a particular passion in each area. Each collaborative will identify an assessment liaison as well as a facilitator/convener. In addition, each group must work with designated assessment consultants to guide decisions as to what is meaningful evidence and to ensure that component-level outcomes are linked to the program-level outcomes already in place.
2. Adopt appropriate best practices for teaching and learning. This effort involves consulting, training and workshops on pedagogy, research on learning, and the use of experiential learning, service-learning, technology, and active learning. While student learning is the goal, faculty development is necessary to make that goal possible.
3. Create and implement a specific assessment cycle, operating on a semester basis, linked to program-level outcomes.
We realized, of course, that there was likely to be more than a year’s work here, and that the second and third items are necessarily ongoing. Thus much of the work of 03/04 focused on the first item. The progress to date of each collaborative follows:
Signature Components:
Augsburg Experience
Description:
There are five types of Augsburg Experiences; students fulfill at least one:
- Internship, cooperative education, student teaching, practica, field work, clinicals
- Service-learning courses and experiences
- Study abroad
- Faculty-student research
- Special and individual off-campus, immersion experience
Learning Outcomes:
Integrating experiential learning with academic learning, the Augsburg Experience is intended to demonstrate enhanced learning and reflect research and best practices in experiential learning. It links on-campus learning to the constituency goals, needs, or ideas of off-campus people, organization, etc. through community partners and/or professional activities, and/or travel. The collaborative established the following learning outcomes:
Students should be capable of:
- Describing the goals, mission, and needs of the external organization.
- Stating how their coursework in their major field and in general education applies to the Augsburg Experience
- Identifying specific linkages between concepts and practices in courses they have taken with the Augsburg Experience.
- Articulating the values and advantage of linking what is learned in their major or another area of their Augsburg education with the external audience or situation.
Classroom Assessment Techniques:
The collaborative established general guidelines and assessment strategies for each type of AE. A post-experience reflection or pre- and post-reflection essay addresses the following topics:
- Articulate the organization’s purposes, goals, structure, and outcomes.
- Describe how the experience has connected [will connect] with and provide application of course material in your major or in another area of your education at Augsburg.
- Explain the value you’ve seen [anticipate] through this experience in the context of your Augsburg education. How is it different from an on-campus classroom experience?
- Relate any personal experiences with people identified with the off-campus organization or situation. How did they contribute to the value added to your education by this experience?
In addition, the collaborative developed rubrics for evaluating these essays.
Best Practices:
We anticipate that faculty development in experiential education will be ongoing. The collaborative, however, helped develop a day in the May Faculty Workshop that both exposed faculty to community resources and shared literature/findings related to best practices, drawing heavily on Peter Ewell’s research.
Current Status:
This collaborative has accomplished the design phase of its work. In the next stage, departments will identify the courses/experiences/etc. that they will offer for their majors. Faculty development will remain an ongoing need.
Augsburg Seminar/First Year Collaborative
The year’s accomplishments were based on Augsburg’s participation as one of twelve Council of Independent College Founding Colleges in the CIC Foundations of Excellence in the First College Year ™ Project, conducted by CIC in collaboration with the Policy Center on the First Year of College, The project is described in detail on the web site: www.brevard.edu/fyfoundations/cic/
Thus this group’s charge was somewhat different than that of other collaboratives.During the last year, a task force including the Dean of the College, four associate deans, student life personnel, an assessment person, the Director of Admissions, students, faculty, and an Enrollment Center representative inventoried and evaluated Augsburg’s achievements in eleven categories (foundations) defined by the Policy Center.
It is safe to say that we are in a “paradigm” shift whereby we are looking more intentionally at the entire experience of the first college year—particularly of weekday students—and connecting the curriculum with the co-curriculum.
As part of its participation in the project, Augsburg administered NSSE for the first time—and thus has just received data on the learning outcomes included in that document.
Current Status:
The task force is writing its final report and identifying the initiatives that will proceed from the exhaustive self-study.
In addition, a first-year collaborative composed of students, faculty, and student services staff met throughout the year to act as an advisory group to the task force. It also specifically discussed possible changes in the current .25 credit Augsburg Seminar student success seminar.
An Augsburg Seminar design team began meeting in August, and is re-constructing the first year, including Augsburg Seminar, based on the findings of the Foundations of Excellence Project, and best practices of learning community theory.
Engaging Minneapolis
Description:
First-year weekday students fulfill this course through a course or co-curricular experience that involves service learning, civic engagement, or cultural engagement. The purpose is to introduce students to experiential learning and introduce them to the resources of the Cities in which they will be studying, living, and working during their Augsburg career.
The collaborative established the following learning outcomes:
- Students should be made more aware of local resources related to the course topic or discipline (e.g. history, chemistry, religion) and ways in which their education is enriched by being in the Twin Cities metropolitan area.
- Students should be made more aware of the range of issues in the Twin Cities metropolitan area and how these issues relate to the course topic.
- Students should have a greater appreciation of the diversity of the Twin Cities (however that diversity may be defined in the context of the course).
- Student should be able to integrate the field experience into their learning in the course.
Classroom Assessment Techniques:
Each course will use a set of questions that their students will answer in writing. Each instructor will summarize these comments, noting areas of success or failure. The questions will address:
- The issue of diversity in the city (if the course addresses diversity)
- Local resources or assets relevant to the course of the student’s future work
- Level of engagement with the city, however that engagement manifests itself in the city
At least one instructor in Political Science piloted an instrument this summer.
Best Practices:
We anticipate that faculty development in experiential education will be ongoing. The collaborative, however, helped develop a day in the May Faculty Workshop that both exposed faculty to community resources and shared literature/findings related to best practices, drawing heavily on Peter Ewell’s research.
Current Status:
To date, many of the participants in the collaborative have been the social scientists whose courses fulfilled a “city” requirement in the last general education.
Last spring we realized that we needed to engage more people from the sciences, arts, and humanities in the discussion and thus split the group into several areas of emphasis.
This fall all but three Augsburg Seminar linked courses are employing service learning, cultural engagement, or civic engagement in their courses.
Infusing Diversity
This collaborative’s charge was also different from others’. In approving the new Augsburg Core Curriculum, the faculty committed itself to infusing diversity and global awareness throughout the curriculum. Specific areas of the general education curriculum—Modern Languages, the Many Voices Project, Search for Meaning, Engaging Minneapolis, and the Keystone course—were asked to address diversity explicitly. But we believe that students should be encountering themes of diversity and global awareness in their majors as well.
This collaborative began its work by designing and conducting interviews with all departments to discover current definitions and learning outcomes as defined by individual majors. Most, though not all, departments, do address diversity and/or global awareness, though outcomes and best practices vary according to the discipline. The work of the collaborative—specifically the interviews of chairs—encouraged at least some departments to have conversations about their curricula that might not have occurred before. But we are aware that some departments have yet to talk about the intentionality of these themes in their curricula.
Additionally, the collaborative reviewed some national assessment instruments
(e.g. Western Michigan University’s instrument). It looked at Augsburg data as ascertained by CIRP. The administration of NSSE to first year students and seniors will provide some additional data about current Augsburg students.Current Status:
We are ready to analyze the NSSE data as well as the departmental surveys to more accurately ascertain where we are. A significant amount of work lies ahead.
Keystone Course
Description:
Taken in the senior year, this course asks students to look both backward and forward as they reflect on their Augsburg education and connect what they have learned through their major and general education to their futures.
Learning Outcomes:
Much of this group’s work was spent discussing and modifying the learning outcomes approved by the faculty. Modified outcomes include:
- Students will demonstrate critical self-awareness of knowledge, skills and beliefs developed through the total educational experience and how those skills and abilities can be applied thorough reflection and evaluation of their knowledge, skills and beliefs.
- Students will demonstrate an understanding of connections between the discipline and other areas of education and give examples of how they will apply theories, ideas, and values to the future through reflecting on their discipline and its interconnections to other disciplines.
- Students will describe how issues of faith, diversity, and urban location transformed them and describe their understanding of how these concepts affect life-decisions through reflection on the mandated topics of faith, diversity, and urban location.
- Students will identify core values used in decision-making by reflection on the interplay of personal and disciplinary values with examples of service/leadership roles.
- Students will articulate Augsburg’s concept of vocation and their personal conclusions and commitments on vocation.
Classroom Assessment Techniques:
The collaborative began work on possible portfolio evaluation.
Current Status:
The collaborative conducted a workshop for faculty on May 19. It is preparing a proposal to formalize criteria and learning outcomes.
Search for Meaning (Christian Vocation and the Search for Meaning)
Description:
Based in the religion department, REL 100 and 200 Christian Vocation and the Search for Meaning ask students to consider Christian theological tradition and the bible as they consider their Vocations and educational purposes.
Search for Meaning I and II were developed in 02-03. The first course piloted in Fall 03. Based on the fall experience, some revisions were made in Spring 04 with an effort to focus more on the “grand questions” of life’s meaning.
The Department also piloted assessment techniques, asking questions pertaining to vocation on mid-term and final exams. Analysis is forthcoming. The department developed a substantial faculty development program. In triads and quadrads, faculty worked together to develop syllabi, readings, activities, and assignments. They visited each other’s classes, providing suggestions for improving as well as learning from their colleagues. They presented a segment on the course during the Spring Faculty Workshop, familiarizing colleagues with approaches to the topic of vocation. The department has incorporated specific critical thinking learning outcomes into the course sequence; its members demonstrated to the faculty ways in which specific attention to critical thinking can be used in delivering course content.
Current Status:
Search for Meaning II will be offered this fall. The collaborative will continue to refine learning outcomes and rubrics for assessing student learning during 04-05.
Liberal Arts Foundations
Description:
This is the liberal arts core of the Augsburg Core Curriculum. Students take two courses in each of four domains:
Fine Arts
Learning Outcomes:
The collaborative defined the following learning outcomes:
- Students will engage in the creative, imaginative, and technical process to produce, interpret, or perform a work of art
- Students will identify or recognize the breadth and diversity of work in the fine arts across time, space, and culture.
- Students will critically analyze works of art in at least one of the fine arts disciplines and articulate different theories of aesthetics.
- Students will recognize the fine arts as expressions of the human condition and reflections of values and cultures.
Current Status:
The collaborative is ready to go on to the next phase of its work, developing rubrics for evaluating student outcomes and collecting material on national standards for Fine Arts education and information from accrediting agencies.
Humanities
The Humanities Collaborative began its work, appropriately enough, with a philosophical discussion of the Humanities based on Martha Nussbaum’s
Cultivating Humanity.Learning Outcomes:
Although the collaborative defined possible learning outcomes within specific disciplines, it has defined only one domain-wide outcome to date:
Students will learn to use reason and imagination to enter a broader world of cultures, groups and ideas.
Current Status
The group will resume work on Task 1 this fall.
Natural Sciences and Mathematics
Learning Outcomes
The collaborative refined learning outcomes approved by the faculty in Fall 02 to state that students in natural science/math LAF courses will:
- Recall, comprehend, and apply appropriate disciplinary content, as defined by the individual departments, with an understanding of the limitations of science and math.
- Understand science and math as a systematic and creative activity and not a static body of knowledge.
- Express scientific and mathematical ideas using discipline-appropriate language.
- Appreciate the usefulness and relevance of science and mathematics as organized ways of learning.
Classroom Assessment Techniques
The collaborative identified a pre- and post-course attitude survey designed by Mike Zeilik of the University of New Mexico and decided to use it across all courses with only the subject name (e.g. physics, biology, etc.) being changed.
The pretest was piloted in some courses at the beginning and end of the Spring 2004 semester. Evaluation is forthcoming.The collaborative has found some preliminary rubrics for assessing lab reports.
Current Status
The collaborative will resume its work this fall by analyzing last term’s survey data. Because it focused on student learning outcomes last year, it will turn its attention to best practices this year.
Social and Behavioral Sciences
Learning Outcomes
This collaborative is still struggling to find common learning outcomes across the social and behavioral sciences. Each department conducted some assessment across sections of each discipline. For example, Economics asked students in two sections of Macro Economics and one section of Micro Economics to read articles and address a set of questions that would reveal their familiarity with disciplinary methods. Sociology asked all of its SOC 121 (Introduction to Human Society) students to explain the main ideas of three theoretical perspectives and demonstrate how each applies to a selected article. There is not yet a consistent approach to assessment across the domain.
Current Status
The collaborative will resume its quest for domain-wide learning outcomes this fall.
Core Skills
Effective Writing/Many Voices Project
Description
Effective Writing is a core skill required for graduation. The course is charged with explicitly introducing the theme of diversity through the Many Voices Project, a common text that all students enrolled in the course in a given year must read and write about. We hope to augment the Project by asking others on campus to read the book and refer to it/schedule programming on it in other courses and co-curricular programming.
Learning Outcomes
Learning outcomes have been established for quite some time. This year they were revised to include explicit attention to diversity. Learning outcomes are:
1. By the end of the term students will demonstrate in writing done both in class and out of class, the ability:
- To use a variety of methods to generate ideas
- To discover and develop a thesis statement
- To organize material using the methods appropriate to purpose, content, and diverse audiences
- To use basic methods of coherence and transition
- To write papers relatively free of errors in spelling, punctuation, and grammar
2. Students will successfully complete a research assignment.
3. Students will demonstrate an increasing ability to evaluate their own writing.
4. Students will read, analyze, and write abut one substantive literary work chosen to challenge the students intellectually, aesthetically, and culturally.
Classroom Assessment Techniques
The collaborative piloted the following CATS:
- Placement exam. Four sections of ENG 111 retook the placement exam at the end of ENG 111 and compared their rewrite with the original. Students tended to write better at the end, (although some were similar); almost universally they showed the ability to articulate the strengths/weaknesses in their writing.
- One-minute essay on diversity—intended to assess “where students are” re. diversity
- Metacognitive questions about diversity
Current Status
We expect this to be an ongoing project—as attention to best practices of writing and discussion of the common text have been during at least the last 20 years.
Foundations of Fitness
Description
A core physical fitness course that is designed to help students become aware of the components and benefits of lifelong physical fitness and how they relate to a lifestyle of health and wellness and to help students set goals and adopt lifestyles that lead to health and wellness.
This course was developed during the 02-03 term, and thus the activities of the collaborative focused on collecting evidence of student learning. The collaborative developed a survey that was administered at the end of the course.
In addition the collaborative has identified the following best practices:
- The student will be provided the knowledge, skills, and techniques necessary to become a physically educated person.
- Through active participation in laboratory sessions, the student will experience first hand how various fitness activities positively affect one’s quality of life.
- The student will be provided an atmosphere for exercise that is fun and stress free.
- The student will be given choices as to the types of activities he or she wishes to use to develop personal fitness goals.
- The student will participate in goal setting exercises that will require writing personal fitness goals in a format that helps ensure success.
Current Status
This course is well in place. At this point, the collaborative will probably focus on “maintenance” issues as it continues to assess student learning and adopt new insights into best practices of learning.
Modern Language
Description
The study of language is a fairly traditional component of a liberal arts education. The faculty intends it to be an explicit curricular home for the theme of global awareness as well as providing students with the novice level language proficiency that can serve as a foundation for further language study and travel.
Learning Outcomes
The collaborative drafted the following:
- Students will be able to recognize, articulate, explain, and evaluate similarities and differences between American English-speaking culture and the culture/s of the target language.
- Students will be able to recognize and articulate positive and negative contributions of the culture’s target language.
Current Status
The collaborative will continue to refine learning outcomes, work on classroom assessment techniques, rubrics, and evidence of student learning, as well as research into best practices of learning.
Graduation Skills
Description
Augsburg students must fulfill graduation skill requirements in critical thinking, quantitative reasoning, speaking and writing. The new Augsburg Core Curriculum requires departments to embed them in the major or instruct their students which courses they should take to fulfill the requirement.
During Spring semester, a task force met to review the skills, and their criteria as well as to recommend models for embedding the skills in the majors.
Status
At the end of the academic year, the task force concluded its work and will present its recommendation to the Academic Affairs Committee.
Miscellaneous
During the last year we have also paid attention to how we present our Augsburg Core Curriculum to various audiences so that they can understand the philosophical basis and coherence of “an Augsburg education.” Specific efforts have included producing a more refined graphic of the curriculum (The Augsburg Core curriculum arch) that can be helpful in introducing new students and their parents to the curriculum.
We also modified the Honors Program to reflect the new requirements, resulting, we hope, in an imaginative curriculum that can help us pilot innovative approaches to teaching and learning.
Finally, we piloted the first interdisciplinary (“Connections”) Liberal Arts Foundation course—Medieval Connections, a course which was innovative enough to be featured on Minnesota Public Radio, a local newspaper, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.
2. Describe how the institution involved people in work on this Action Project.
The Director of General Education and Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning, in consultation with the Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs named conveners of the collaboratives described above. Conveners in turn used a variety of methods to convene groups. Some collaboratives were based in departments: Effective Writing, Search for Meaning, Modern Languages, and Foundations of Fitness. Liberal Arts Foundation (LAF) conveners asked departments to recommend representatives. In some cases this was participatory—departments met and recommended. In other cases, chairs recommended themselves. Some conveners asked the Director of General Education for recommendations (e.g. the Keystone). The Director of General Education named the CIC Foundations of Excellence Task Force. The Academic Affairs Committee named the Augsburg Experience collaborative committee and graduation skills task force. Seventy-eight (78) different people (mostly faculty, but also some staff and students) participated in one or more collaboratives.
Finally, the May Faculty/Staff Workshop was focused on “Sampling the New Curriculum.” Seventy-five faculty and staff participated in the workshop. The first day took participants off campus as they sampled Engaging Minneapolis and the Augsburg Experience. The second day featured a sample “Search for Meaning” class and a discussion with the author of the 04-05 term’s Many Voices Project text.
3. Describe your planned next steps for this Action Project.
- We anticipate that most of the collaboratives will be ongoing groups that will be a vehicle for faculty development and maintaining quality in our AugCore program.
These groups are in different stages of completing the tasks assigned to them last fall. Some are still identifying learning objectives; others have moved on to assessment and best practices. We will ask them to continue their work this next year.
Next year we must begin implementing the first Keystone courses; thus there will be great emphasis on completing the learning outcomes and developing the prototypes.
- The completion of the CIC Foundations of Excellence in the First College Year™ project will suggest quite a few initiatives. Most important, we want to operationalize the philosophy of the first year curriculum (and co-curriculum) that this Augsburg Core Curriculum has made possible. This will include extensive revision of our Augsburg Seminar course, attention to advising and registration processes, the intentional designation of courses to serve undeclared majors as well as majors, and the creation of co-curricular partnerships. We expect to draft a first year philosophy and create a structure (first year committee/budget) that can support the philosophical coherence of the first year.
We think that our efforts in this area will help us with overall assessment of the general education curriculum, since it compels us to define what we mean by an “educated person” and define the measures of that definition.
- The graduation skills will receive more attention this year. Leadership teams will serve as a resource for departments as they embed skills more firmly in majors, if they already have not done so. We will ask Liberal Arts Foundations to explicitly introduce appropriate skills in the courses that qualify to meet the requirement.
- Finally, we anticipate that some components of the curriculum—the Keystone, the diversity infusion model, Engaging Minneapolis, the Many Voices Project—are still in their design stages. Since these are new in a way that other components (e.g. writing, language requirements, liberal arts courses) are not, we are only beginning to see their potential in the curriculum.
4. Describe an "effective practice(s)" that resulted from work on this Action Project.
As noted above, all collaboratives were charged to adopt the best practices of teaching and learning in their arenas. While we would like to think that all of our faculty already are using “best practices of teaching and learning” in their courses, we believe that the discussions of the last year have given a new vigor and intentionality to faculty development in general education.
To give a few examples: the Religion Department in particular became a “learning community” as its members worked collaboratively on syllabi, shared success (and failure) stories, developed curricular units, and visited each other’s classrooms. The English Department has had a tradition of biannual faculty development, but the piloting of the assessment essay as well as meetings led some to reconsider their own classroom strategies. Augsburg always has been strong in experiential education, but the implementation of Engaging Minneapolis in particular has produced a wider core of faculty who are using experiential education in their first year classrooms—and participating in faculty development efforts.
The collaborative itself, we think, is an “effective practice” in faculty development.
Our work on first year Foundations of Excellence ™ has led to the review of “best practices,” at least as defined by the project; we know that we already do a lot well—but of course the next year will see an improvement in our practices as we put into action what we have learned.
5. What challenges, if any, are you still facing in regards to this Action Project?
The most important challenge is that implementing a general education curriculum is a task that should never be regarded as “complete”—thus we need to maintain faculty interest and energy. That is, we know that best practices of teaching and learning change and thus we need to keep revisiting what we do.
That said, in this next year we face several major challenges: beginning to implement the keystone course; coming to a community understanding of what an infusion model of diversity and global awareness should achieve; embedding the skills more firmly in the disciplines—and determining the implication of doing so for how we introduce them at the core general education level; the practical (let alone philosophical) difficulties of implementing a coherent and carefully designed first year. We know that some departments have not had serious conversations about the keystone, graduation skills, or the infusion model; we are challenged to bring them into the conversation. Collaboratives, as noted, are at various stages of defining learning outcomes and identifying appropriate assessment strategies.
6. If you would like to discuss the possibility of AQIP providing you help to stimulate progress on this action project, explain your need(s) here and tell us who to contact and when.
We do not know of many other colleges/universities that have replaced the “inoculation” model of diversity with the “infusion” model. It would be instructive to have models. (Contact Joan Griffin, General Education Director, at griffin@augsburg.edu)