General Education Assessment Process
UC Irvine conducts assessments simply and effectively to facilitate continuous improvements of student learning.
Faculty provide evidence of student learning related to one or more GE learning outcomes by responding to a brief survey that is reviewed by UC Irvine’s Academic Senate.
Process
Faculty Assessment Survey
GE instructors are asked to complete an online survey that is due on the same day that final grades are submitted. The survey is administered by IRAP’s Assessement team and the Academic Senate, and faculty are notified of their assessment expectations 2 weeks before the start of the quarter.
The survey consists of three questions. Faculty are required to answer either Question 1 or Question 2. It is OPTIONAL to respond to BOTH Question 1 and Question 2, and Question 3 is completely OPTIONAL.
QUESTION 1
Write about an instrument that does a good job of assessing how well students meet one or more of the Course Learning Outcomes (CLOs) specified for your General Education course. Describe the instrument and what CLOs it assesses. Explain why it does a good job, and report any relevant statistics and an interpretation of student performance on the instrument.
QUESTION 2
Write about where/how your students are struggling to meet one or more of the Course Learning Outcomes (CLOs) specified for your General Education course. Describe how success is currently assessed, why students struggle with the CLOs, or why assessment is difficult or just inadequate, and indicate how any of these might be improved. You can critique any changes from prior course offerings or propose changes for subsequent offerings.
QUESTION 3
[OPTIONAL] Write criticism or praise for the current CLOs, as they relate to your course. Are there any that don’t apply? If one or more don’t, can you suggest improvements to them or alternative CLOs to replace them?
Academic Senate Review
The Senate Policy and Assessment Subcommittee reviews the submitted GE faculty surveys. The following questions guide the committee’s review process:
- What evidence do we have that suggests students are successfully meeting the learning outcomes?
- Where are students struggling to meet learning outcomes and how can we encourage improvement using that information?
- In the future, would we like to keep or modify these GE survey questions?
Continuous Improvement
Faculty use the results of assessment work and feedback from the Academic Senate to strengthen assessment practices and to improve teaching and learning.
Please see the Using Learning Outcomes Assessment to Improve Academic Programming document to review ways to utilize assessment for continuous academic improvment.