General Education and Student Learning Outcomes Assessment
Through general education, AWC commits faculty and students to the pursuit of wholeness in learning by providing a curriculum that focuses intensely on values and meaning, knowledge and understanding. A responsive general education program requires thoughtful and precise writing, critical reading, quantitative thinking, and processes of analysis and synthesis which underlie reasoning.The ultimate goal of general education is to enable students to continue to participate with active, discerning commitment in the political, ethical, and aesthetic life of the community. (Arizona Western College General Course Catalog 2007 - 2008, page 53-54)
AWC General Education Outcomes
The Assessment Committee has chosen the four outcomes areas below as the initial focus for assessment of student learning outcomes in general education.
General Education: Written Communication
Intended Student Learning Outcomes
- Learners provide writing that presents a clear, specific thesis and awareness of audience; fully develops examples to support thesis in logical, coherent manner; demonstrates original thinking, depth of analysis, and comprehension of material used; and that shows high proficiency in standard English grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
General Education: Critical Thinking
Intended Student Learning Outcomes
- Learners will demonstrate the ability to take charge of their own thinking.
- Learners will demonstrate an intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.
General Education: Quantitative Analysis
Intended Student Learning Outcomes
- Identify and extract relevant data from given mathematical or contextual situations.
- Select known models or develop appropriate models that organize the data into:
- tables or spreadsheets (with or without technology); or
- graphical representations (with or without technology); or
- symbolic/equation format.
- Obtain correct mathematical results and state those results with the qualifiers.
- Use the results to:
- determine whether they are realistic in terms of the original situation; or
- determine whether the mathematical model/representation of data was appropriate; or
- describe a trend in a table, graph, or formula and make predications based on trends; or
- draw qualitative conclusions in written form.
General Education: Technology Applications
Intended Student Learning Outcomes
- Learners will demonstrate a working knowledge of computer basics by opening and closing a program; by creating, saving, printing, finding, renaming, copying, moving and deleting files.
- Learners will perform basic word processing operations including document creation, editing, formatting, printing, saving and retrieving a document.
- Learners will perform basic spreadsheet operations including creating, editing, formatting, printing, saving and retrieving a worksheet including the use of formulas, simple functions, and the copy command.
- Learners will demonstrate the ability to use the Internet in order to access information resources, evaluate their credibility, and apply them.
- Learners will demonstrate the ability to send and receive E-mail including attachments.
The assessment of student performance in general education courses helps us determine what our students already know, don't yet know, and need to know in order to succeed here, at institutions of transfer, and in their careers.
The assessment reports that AWC generates not only help us identify what is being learned but also enable us to make recommendations for improvements to our general education curriculum and to programs which will, in turn, increase the level of student performance in general education.
Responsibility for assessing the learning outcomes for general education belongs to the assessment committee. Initial areas to be assessed include communication, quantitative, critical thinking, and technology applications literacy. Competencies to be assessed and/or assessment instruments may be expanded or modified for subsequent cycles as the committee sees fit. Both direct and indirect indicators are used. Results and analysis of evaluations will be posted on the assessment website and distributed by email attachments.
