The Project: Missions and Majors
This project funded by the Teagle Foundation to Beloit, Knox, Monmouth and Ripon Colleges, has as its primary goal to assess how learning in the major supports all-college goals. We have focused on three goals—civic engagement, quantitative reasoning and critical thinking—and have asked two departments per year at each of our four institutions to devise methods for assessment.
| AAC&U January 2009 Presentation, Do the Parts Add Up to the Whole? |
Our approach was consciously unstructured; we wanted to learn how departments would construct their assessments to serve their needs, and to explore how departments and disciplines at our institutions view their academic mission in relation to the larger goals of the college. Our approach is similar to the best investigative learning that we ask our students to do: to define problems, to propose solutions and then to engage in sharing them with an audience of their peers (BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium).
This project arose from several observations and concerns. The general education curriculum in our colleges ranges from open (Beloit) to a four-year interdisciplinary core (Monmouth), but we had all observed that the general education program was not explicitly integrated with learning in the major. We learned from Derek Bok, in Our Underachieving Colleges (2004), the importance of education in the major to the overall college experience. Finally, when in 2005 Assessment Committee members at Beloit College presented new, faculty approved, mission and goals for student learning to the student Congress, the students responded that “this is like a syllabus for a Beloit College education.” She affirmed that the mission and goals fit her experience of education at Beloit College.
If our goals are a syllabus for the educational experiences at our institutions, as these students identified, then who assesses student progress toward these goals, and how are the goals themselves assessed? Is it the responsibility of the student to make sure that she has done all the right things and taken the right combination of courses, or does the right combination of courses and support just happen when a student chooses a major and succeeds in developing disciplinary expertise and skills? Do all paths (majors) lead to the same skills? Should they? Our project responds to these questions by asking departments if and how they explicitly assure the students’ achievement of all college goals. These simple questions are actually quite challenging—challenging enough to promote curricular revision, challenging enough to ask us to discuss and evaluate what we really do.
We have learned in the past two years that it is indeed possible to get members of some but not all academic departments to think broadly about how what they are doing in their discipline contributes to overall general education goals and that such thinking helps clarify both how we teach and what students learn. Readiness is important. Our program was built on voluntary participation, and recruitment, even with stipends, was difficult. Although faculty would like to know these answers, most of us don’t feel as if we have the time to find out.
The departments that have participated have developed an awareness of what departments are able to gain by addressing all college goals. They now feel an increased ownership over broader educational goals, although they may have discipline-specific views of how these goals are operationalized. In this report we will first review the findings of our project, and then will provide a brief description of activities completed or undertaken by the group of colleges and at our individual institutions.