Course Embedded
Assessment
NOTE: What is described on this page pertains to
the assessment procedure for the old General Education program.
The assessment procedure for courses in the Liberal Arts Core
is (as of 9/18/07) still under development.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. Do I have to do Course Embedded Assessment (CEA) every time I teach this course?
A. No, not so far as the General Education Council is concerned, but your department may want you to do it more frequently than will the Council. The Council requires only that in any semester in which a General Education course you teach is up for review, you do CEA in each section of the course you’re teaching that semester. That is the only time we require you to do CEA. All this is true unless you’re asking about ENG 122. Special rules apply for that course. See the next question.
2. So, what about ENG 122?
A. About 25 sections of ENG 122 are up for review each year. If you’re the instructor of record for one of those sections, you’ll have to do course embedded assessment as part of the course review.
3. How will CEA data be compiled, evaluated and used?
A. The General Education program is subject to program review just as is any department or other academic program, and the Council’s main purpose in collecting CEA data is to be able to use it in that context. The GEC Area Committees, which are made up of faculty representing the relevant departments and programs, will also look at CEA data during their review of particular general education courses to help them in determining whether or not those courses as taught continue to meet the goals of general education. Individual departments and programs may be interested in using the data for their own program reviews. The data are not intended for use in the evaluation of faculty performance.
4. What, if anything, can I expect to get out of the CEA process? In other words: what’s in this for me?
A. A better sense of just how your students are doing when it comes to the goal of providing them with a solid liberal arts education? Maybe even a chance to contribute to the refinement of the university’s understanding of those goals? You could get all these things out of participating in the CEA process, but probably not all that much in the way of fame or money or power or anything like that. Sorry.
5. Do I have to assess student performance in relation to each of the objectives listed on the CEA Reporting Form?
A. Since each general education course is in one of the program’s skills or content areas, student performance in that course is to be assessed in relation to at least most of the student outcome objectives identified for courses in that area. Assess it in relation to all the objectives that are relevant. If there’s some reason that you cannot assess student performance in relation to a specific objective, state that reason clearly on the CEA Reporting Form.
6. Am I supposed to submit copies of student work?
A. Absolutely not. All you should submit for each assignment you use to assess your students’ performance is a copy of the assignment itself or else a description of the assignment — preferably the one you gave your students, assuming that you gave the assignment in writing. Neither the Council nor the Area Committees wish to see student work.
7. Must the criteria and rubrics used for assessment be the same for all the different sections of a course?
A. No, not so far as the Council is concerned. The Council has no intention to try to aggregate or standardize the assessment data from different sections of any general education course. In fact, the reason the Council favors the CEA model is that it gives individual faculty members the freedom to determine for themselves which of their assignments contribute to meeting the objectives of General Education and to define their own criteria for assessing student work. The Council’s only concerns are to be able to evaluate the effectiveness of the General Education program as a whole and to determine whether or not individual courses as taught continue to meet the program’s criteria. If a department or program decides that it would be useful from its own point of view to require the use of at least some standardized criteria and rubrics in order to perform intradepartmental statistical analyses of its own, the Council will have no objection.
Materials to Be Submitted
When a course is up for review, the following materials are to be submitted to the Arts and Sciences Dean’s Office for each section being reviewed (all materials, including the student questionnaires, may be submitted directly to the Dean’s Office by the instructor):
- The course syllabus (the instructional syllabus, not the syllabus of record)
- The completed Course Embedded Assessment (CEA) Reporting Form
- Copies of the exams and/or other materials identified in item B of the CEA Reporting Form (the assignments, not completed student work)
- Copies of the rubrics used to assess student performance
- The completed General Education student questionnaires (both the bubble sheets and student responses to open-ended questions)
Submission Deadline
One month after the grade submission deadline for the semester.
