Academic Quality Improvement Program - General Education AQIP Report
September 7th, 2005
AQIP Action Project Update
1. Describe the past year's accomplishments and the current status of this Action Project.
A great deal of progress has been made on this Action Project over the past year. Groups called “Collaboratives,” composed of faculty and staff, have made progress on the development and implementation of the Augsburg Core Curriculum. Support from a Bush Foundation Grant that is focused on assessment of student learning advanced this work.
This Action Project’s Year Two “stretch targets” were the focus of activity in 2005-2006. Developing and implementing an assessment of student learning plan for the College’s complex general education program is a challenge that will require more time than was originally anticipated when this Action Project was developed. We plan to continue this Action Project for at least one additional year to emphasize the important place of general education in Augsburg’s undergraduate curriculum. The Year 3 “stretch targets” are appropriate to the work that must be completed in 2005-2006 and 2006-2007.
Highlights of the status of curriculum development/implementation and assessment of the components of the Augsburg Core Curriculum follow:
LIBERAL ARTS FOUNDATION (LAF)
- Fine Arts, Humanities, and Social/Behavioral Sciences have drafted preliminary learning outcomes for courses meeting domain requirements.
SIGNATURE CURRICULUM
Augsburg Seminar:
- Revised Augsburg Seminar to extend throughout entire semester and be more integrated into linked disciplinary course (approved by Academic Affairs Committee).
- Completed CIC Foundations of Excellence in the First College Year project—perhaps a reason for recent ranking in U.S. News and World Report’s first-year experience category.
Search for Meaning:
- Continued refining learning outcomes and assessment processes.
Keystone:
- Assessment criteria approved by the Academic Affairs Committee.
- Six courses approved for pilot to be run in 2005-2006.
Engaging Minneapolis:
- Continued work on assessment criteria.
- Continued work on developing three models: service learning, civic engagement, cultural engagement.
SKILLS
Health and Physical Education Foundations of Fitness:
- Completed curriculum planning work; now implementing assessment of student learning plan.
Graduation Skills:
- Critical Thinking Leadership team developed matrix of learning outcomes and conducted a workshop in May 2005.
- Quantitative Reasoning (QR): Attended summer workshop; developed preliminary proposal for piloting baseline assessment of QR skills (as distinct from math); identified courses that could help students remediate QR skills; initial planning of faculty workshop.
- Speaking: Defined four “genres” of speaking assignments. Revised student learning objectives. Began work on rubrics as well as expectations/resources for instructors.
- Writing: Leadership team was formed and has begun initial review of literature and interviews of department chairs.
DIVERSITY/GLOBAL AWARENESS INFUSION
- Collaborative met, reviewed other institutions’ learning objectives.
- Collated interviews with department chairs; presented “what the faculty are already doing in courses” at Faculty meeting.
2. Describe how the institution involved people in work on this Action Project.
- Collaboratives/skills leadership teams involving four to eight people for each component of the Augsburg Core Curriculum
- Workshops for entire faculty offered in 2004-2005 (First Year Workshop, Critical Thinking Workshop, Keystone/Critical Conversations Workshop)
- Convocation for Many Voices Project
- Academic Affairs Committee
- Assessment Committee
- Director of General Education, Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning, Assessment Director, Academic Dean
3. Describe your planned next steps for this Action Project.
This Action Project will be extended for a fourth year because of its importance to the College’s educational enterprise and because of the amount of work that needs to be done. We believe that it will take 4-5 years to realize the first level of implementation and assessment of the Augsburg Core Curriculum.
Priorities for 2005-2006 include:
- Develop general education governance that can help coordinate efforts of individual collaboratives/skills leadership teams and perhaps relieve Academic Affairs Committee of more mundane administrative tasks.
- Initially this will be achieved by giving more release time to the Director of General Education for administration of the program; over the course of the next year, we need to plan the transition from the individual collaboratives (although they will persist for faculty development purposes) to a more cohesive structure.
- This general education governance body—or perhaps the existing Assessment Committee—will work toward gathering the individual assessment efforts of curricular components into program-level assessment.
- Additionally, the Director of General Education will launch a project on “creating a general education faculty.”
- Continue work of assessment and curriculum development work of collaboratives and leadership teams. Examples include:
LIBERAL ARTS FOUNDATION
Achieve domain consensus about learning outcomes included on syllabi.
- Continue plans for explicitly addressing critical thinking skills in domain courses.
- Further develop/pilot assessment.
SIGNATURE CURRICULUM
Augsburg Seminar:
- Inaugurate First Year Committee to coordinate efforts among the many units (admissions, student services, academic programs) that serve first year students.
- Develop first year assessment beyond NSSE.
- Evaluate/refine “new” Augsburg Seminar format being implemented in Fall 2005 (e.g. earlier and more intentional recruitment of sections; opportunities for faculty to nominate orientation leaders, etc.).
Search for Meaning:
- Further develop assessment instrument.
Keystone:
- Pilot/critique courses—continue design work.
- Continue to develop Critical Conversations on Vocation in consultation with instructors of keystones offered this year.
SKILLS
- Health and Physical Education transitions into making implementation of assessment a normal part of departmental work.
- Modern Language continues work on defining learning outcomes.
- Quantitative Leadership team revises math placement exam, if funding is available, to assess entry Quantitative Reasoning skills (QR); conducts faculty workshop on QR, gets feedback from departments currently offering QR courses regarding proposed revision, develops assessment tools for graduation skill and entry skill QR courses.
- Speaking Leadership team brings revised criteria to Academic Affairs Committee and offers a workshop.
INFUSING DIVERSITY/GLOBAL AWARENESS
- Identify learning outcomes that can be accommodated by the infusion model.
- Coordinate learning outcomes/efforts of curricular components that are specifically charged with addressing diversity/global awareness (e.g. Effective Writing, Search for Meaning, Engaging Minneapolis).
4. Describe an "effective practice(s)" that resulted from work on this Action Project.
We will continue to make presentations at appropriate professional conferences during the next year. Most notably, Augsburg will make three presentations at the AAC&U conference “General Education and Outcomes That Matter in a Changing World” in March. One will address the process with which we revised the curriculum; another will describe Engaging Minneapolis and Augsburg Experience as bookends in the curriculum; the third will be a roundtable discussion on “Professing General Education”—i.e. strategies for creating an academic culture in which one has a professional allegiance to general education as well as to one’s discipline.
5. What challenges, if any, are you still facing in regards to this Action Project?
If there were ever a candidate for continuous quality improvement, it’s general education. To cite a few major challenges beyond the implementation of specific components of the curriculum:
- We need to move beyond assessment of individual curricular components to program-level assessment. NSSE is of some help, but is not sufficient.
- We are challenged to build “general education citizenship.” This means identifying, developing, and rewarding faculty whose professional identify can be at least partly fulfilled in teaching first-year students, who will be able to profess the public purposes of their disciplines, and who will attend to skills as well as content in general education courses.
Finally, defining and developing an infusion model of diversity and global awareness remains a very important challenge.
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.
If AQIP is aware of other colleges/universities that have adopted an infusion model of diversity/global awareness (apart from the conventional one-course or two-course requirement), we would appreciate learning what they do.