"Assessing Student Learning in General Ed," Paradise Valley Examples

Paradise Valley Community College is in the Maricopa County (in Arizona) Community College District. This reading is an excerpt from a larger article, and it begins with a brief mention of re-structuring the college went through to become learning centered. Like us, they have their high enrollment in gen. ed. classes, and so want to emphasize assessment of student learning in that context, but they also want to assess the student learning done outside of the classrooms, and student support areas have been engaged, also, in forming/assessing learning outcomes.



There follows an overview of the General Education program. For the Maricopa County CCD gen ed program there are seven "essential knowledge and skills" that are taught across the gen ed curriculum:

• communication


• arts and humanities


• numeracy


• scientific inquiry


• information literacy


• problem-solving and critical thinking


• cultural diversity

The article also lists twelve skills and qualities students should have as a result of the gen ed curriculum, and they read like specific learning outcomes (see p 128).

From the Maricopa County gen ed, Paradise Valley CC has distilled their own gen ed goals. They have embraced critical thinking overall, and they list six specific learning outcomes for this(convenient to review when we turn to assessing critical thinking). They divided their gen ed into four areas, all of which will contribute to the common goal of these critical thinking skills. The four areas are:

• communication


• information literacy


• problem solving


• technology (new to any list)

It is not completely clear to me how it all flows together; each of these areas have their own learning outcomes, which I found on their web site and printed out for us all (you haven't enough to read...thank me later).

There is a paragraph next which mentions the collaborative role of student support professionals; assessment of out-of-class learning is still a work in progress.

The last piece of the article is perhaps most pertinent to us. It describes briefly their assessment of the gen ed. program, and discusses first why they do it. There is nothing surprising in their list of reasons (seee p 131).

The structure of their assessment process is the following:

I The Academic Assessment Team (AAT): they developed a multiyear assessment plan and completed a course mapping matrix, linking gen ed courses with gen ed outcomes (as we did for the core curriculum)

II General Assessment Teams: There is one for each of the four gen ed areas (see list above), and their duties are to research best practices, create learning outcome rubrics and scoring guides, approve the list of courses for initial implementation of assessment, conduct interdisciplinary discussions w/colleaugues, assist w/college-wide training.

These teams work on an annual cycle:

Fall--Assessment planning (cross disciplinary rubrics for each area, three level scale established (meets, does not meet, exceeds standard), courses identified, faculty trained in use of the rubrics)

Spring--Assessment

Summer--data analysis

Where PVCC is now: they've completed the first round of assessments using 89 class sections, and faculty are developing strategies to improve learning based on these results.

Relevance to our plans: The overall structure is a decent snapshot of a whole-college plan for assessing routinely. They, too, are using a subset of their classes, and clearly cross disciplinary discussions will be needed. But it is a bare bones picture where one suspects the devil is in the details. I am interested in their plans to asssess learning outcomes out of the classroom.