The use of a reader-response format assessment instrument for evaluating general education skills is well established in the academy.  The same may be said for designing a rubric which focuses on outcomes that are agreed upon by those utilizing that evaluative standard.  Thus, the issue facing the workgroup was to design an instrument and rubric which focused on the general education skills targeted, and applied standards which would be responsive to the development of our students.  

The format of our reader-response instrument provided the student with a test booklet modeled to coordinate with ACT’s CAAP tests.  This design coordination was considered important in that the sampling and testing procedures used in CAAP testing had proven itself successful at gathering a solid sample of students across the college with high participation rates and high ranking of effort.  These are the two elements most frequently causing problems with college wide assessment testing.  The instrument is composed of two booklets. 

One booklet contains the instructions and a reading.  In the current application that reading is two short statements – one supports a position and the second opposes a position.  The question being address is an “open-question.”  That is, a question that does not have a single “right” answer, but rather it has several possible answers, each of which might be acceptable to different people.  As such, these types of questions are those faced in a real world of complex issues.   These types of questions appear to be those targeted in the general education outcomes statement.

The second booklet contains a form that collects basic students’ information and five lined-pages for the student’s written response. The form also contains spaces for the nine survey questions that can be included when conducting the CAAP testing and a self-report of effort.