Programmatic & LAC (Gen-Ed) Assessments

Programmatic (Internal) Assessment

Our current FYW Program assessment relies on pre- and post-course student surveys that seek to gauge how students’ perceptions — about writing and about themselves as writers — may have changed after taking LANG 120. We ask each LANG 120 instructor to invite students to complete the pre-survey during the first week of classes and the post-survey during the last week of classes. Let students know that these surveys are completely anonymous and will not impact their grade in LANG 120. Links to each survey appear below. (If you discover the links have not been updated for the relevant semester, please let the FYW Coordinator know!) Here following are links to the current semester’s surveys, with the dates they’ll be open:

Liberal Arts Core (Gen-Ed Program) Assessment

The LAC Advisory Committee plans to complete campus-wide assessments of our five LAC student learning outcomes during AY 2024-2025, including two or three — Written Communication, Critical Thinking, and possibly Interdisciplinary Perspectives — for which we plan to include student work from as many sections of LANG 120 as possible. The LAC committee intends to use the AAC&U rubrics to score student artifacts, as follows:

  • Written Communication, criteria 1 (context & purpose) and 2 (content development), which will require that we have both student work AND any prompts or instructions that explain the context and purpose for the task
  • Critical Thinking, criteria 4 (student’s position) and 5 (conclusions)
  • Integrative Learning, criteria 1 (connections to own experience) and 2 (connections across disciplines)

All the LAC committee asks from FYW faculty is to plan for assignments — small or large, formal or informal, single or multiple — that could be assessed using the criteria above. (Note that for each rubric, both criteria would need to be relevant to the student work assessed.) Note, however, that any given assignment need not relate to all three of these at once, but I would like for as many of us as possible to provide student work for each of these. Keep watch for more details about when we would be asked to share student work, but it would likely be toward the end of the semester.