Consulting Services: Assessment Topics:

General Education Assessment

General Education assessments are based on a definition of "general education" established at an institution. 
Such definitions can be divided into three general patterns.
bullet General education is defined as skills, abilities, and attitudes.
bullet General education is defined as a core or information, knowledge, shared culture and attitudes.
bullet General education is defined as a distribution of classes, the Chinese menu approach.  Sometimes this definition is an implementation of one of the first two approaches.

 

General education assessments can be classified into three approaches.
bullet Assessment based on standardized or locally developed tests to evaluate general education outcomes as either
  bulletIndividually based - as when every student must pass minimum requirements or before entering their major
  bulletInstitution-wide - as when a sampling of students is tested as representative of a school's students
bullet Assessment based on an articulation of general education outcomes with specific course based outcomes.
bullet Assessment  based on survey or other indirect indicators.  (This is an inadequate approach, although it may be a part of multiple indicators combined with one of the first two approaches.
The following examples illustrate two approaches to the assessment of general education.
bullet Using a standardized test (ACT's CAAP) to assess skills in reading comprehension, mathematics, critical thinking, science reasoning, and writing skills in a controlled sampling of class-sections and statistical controls to obtain and analyze a representative sample of a college's students.  (List of widely used general education tests)
bullet Using a locally designed rubric in a reader-response instrument to analyze written communication and synthesis skills.