General education requirements to change beginning in summer 2011

What are students going to learn in the classes they take? Did the students learn what they needed to learn? How do we know?

These are a few of the important questions assessors of undergraduate education are asking, said Sonya Stephens, IU’s vice provost for undergraduate education.

“As faculty, we all do assessment, but we just don’t make it clear to our students and colleagues,” she said. “There is a lot of evidence that students learn more effectively if they are told about course objectives up-front.”

In an effort to implement an overall student learning assessment, beginning Summer Session I in 2011 every school across the IU-Bloomington campus will have the same general education requirements, which are now posted on the IU website.

General education will no longer be individualized by major, school or department but will be the same for all IU students.

“The first part of the general education requirements is the common ground, where there will be about 800 classes that students can choose from,” said Stephens, who is overseeing the project. “Every student will take one English class and one math class as well as a world languages and cultures, which includes foreign languages.”

Through the general education initiative, Stephens said students will have a clear idea of what is expected of them in each course because concrete objectives will be identified and emphasized in the syllabus and throughout the semester.

“At the beginning of the syllabus for a class, there are the course objectives,” said Jean Robinson, professor of political science and associate dean for faculty and academic programs in the College of Arts and Sciences. “We want to track the course objectives though the syllabus. When a student takes a test, we want them to be able to relate what they learned back to the objectives, and we want it to be explicit.”

Every course, not just general education courses, will now be required to have pre-stated student learning outcomes.

Faculty members will also have to choose one assignment for a class and make sure it follows the outcome guidelines set by the department, Stephens said.

“We are trying to assess what every student is learning in every course,” Stephens said. “If we discover things aren’t going very well in a particular class and students aren’t getting the skills, then we will try a new tactic. We will keep looking until we get it right, and the faculty will do something to change the course.”

This campus-wide effort hopes to gather information about a course’s effectiveness. However, Stephens said professors will provide the learning outcomes for their classes individually.

“There are 60 different departments in the College of Arts and Sciences, and they are all working autonomously,” Robinson said. “The college as a whole is suggesting and leading the different departments, but the faculty is in charge of the curriculum.”

The History Learning Project, developed by four IU history professors, looks at the knowledge and skills students get out of the classes they are taking.

Other departments are looking at this assessment as well to see how the required and elective classes fit in with courses’ outcomes.

In the senior seminars, the political science department wants the students to be able to bring together the outcomes and build on their analytical skills, Robinson said.

“We want students to get a clear sense of the skills they have, which can be useful in helping them get jobs or get into graduate school,” Robinson said. “Students are developing analytical, quantitative and qualitative skills, and we want this to be more transparent to the students. They can see how all of these skills work together.”

In addition to the general requirement changes, the project will also include a new course approval system, not just for general education but for all other classes, too.

The electronic system, which will replace the old paper system, will include learning objectives and how to assess them, Stephens said.

“When a new course is proposed, a specification of learning outcomes is proposed for that class,” said Karen Hanson, provost and executive vice president at IU. “But a lot of courses are older and have not been assessed that way.”

The paper-based system included the textbook and prerequisite requirements.
Now, newer class requests need to include a specification of learning outcomes, Hanson said.

“We want to make the learning outcomes and programs clear,” Stephens said. “The faculty needs to see that the students are meeting learning expectations. Things can’t be measured that haven’t been stated in advance.”

There are other factors that help assess learning outcomes, such as placement test data, Stephens said.

“We want students to gain the content and tools it takes to help them move forward,” Robinson said. “We want students to understand what is meaningful about their major. It goes beyond grades. Students get the knowledge they need in their majors to move forward in their lives.”