Abstract Upon pausing to consider the progress accomplished in the implementation of a revised general education (GenEd) program, faculty, and staff of the General Education Assessment Committee (GEAC) at Virginia Commonwealth University identified key lessons that supported success and opportunities to enhance assessment in our program. This article shares what was learned. The experience underscored […]
Satisfying Program-Level Outcomes by Integrating Primary Literature into the Online Classroom
Abstract: Because of the coronavirus pandemic, there has been a paradigm shift from traditional classroom instruction to remote online modalities. To provide the most current and relevant information on nuclear medi- cine technology to students without access to traditional resources on a college campus, it has become imperative that primary literature within the field be […]
Nothing But Skill
It’s About Behavior Purposeful behavior or action is a demonstration of skills and competencies, present not only in every classroom but in any human interaction as well. Skills are behaviors that show how well we govern and how effectively we use the theoretical knowledge stored in our brains. The struggle for educators is that “behavior” […]
Making General Education Visible
By Joanne Liebman Matson and Belinda Blevins-Knabe on May 11, 2023 in General Education, Vol 4, Issue 1 (May 2023)
Making General Education Visible How visible is general education? Assessment has shown us the importance in education of being more transparent, of articulating learning outcomes and providing evidence of learning. Russian Formalist Shklovsky (1965), when describing art, used a metaphor that translates into English as “make it stony.” To make something stony is to defamiliarize […]
Interview: with Dr. Natasha Jankowski
Dr. Natasha Jankowski is a higher education and assessment expert and the former Executive Director of the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA). She is co-author of the books Using Evidence of Student Learning to Improve Higher Education; the book Degrees that Matter: Moving Higher Education to a Learning Systems Paradigm, and the […]
Combatting a Compliance Mindset by Advocating for Betterment
While accreditation work consists of adherence to standards and criteria, too often efforts are reduced to simply a compliance mindset to satisfy accreditors (Ewell, 2009; Gaston, 2018; Levy et al., 2018). To combat a compliance mindset with accreditation work, this article encourages a betterment approach to promote continuous improvement rather than focusing solely on meeting […]
End of Course Reflections and Changes Informed by Assessment During the Covid-19 Pandemic
Most educational practices continued during the academic year 2020-2021 despite the restrictions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. While faculty certainly had to pivot and replace in-person modality with a virtual reality, this switch to virtual did not fully define the educational improvement at the course level at Georgian Court University (GCU). This statement is collaborated […]
The Potential and Pitfalls of Net Promoter Scores (NPS) as a “Business World” Metric in Academic Assessment
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) was introduced in 2003 and has since been embraced by a vast majority of major companies worldwide. However, higher education has been slower to adopt this simple metric, in part because students aren’t exactly customers. Although they can choose among the many educational institutions and resources that are available just […]
Assessing the Implementation of Changes to Teaching
To satisfy various stakeholders, including their institution’s administrators, faculty assess the effectiveness of their teaching (Haras, et. al, 2017). End-of-course student evaluations are still the most widely used method to assess teaching (Lawrence, 2018). Increasingly, however, research evidence shows that student bias, such as expected grade, gender, age, race, and attractiveness of the teacher all […]
Creating Equity: Scaffolding First-Year Composition At A Hispanic-Serving Institution
Knowing that First-Year Composition (FYC) is closely tied to student success at our Hispanic-serving institution, we conducted a pilot study to see how redesigning our FYC courses with scaffolded reading and writing instruction might impact pass rates and retention of our Latinx students. The results of this study clearly demonstrated that a scaffolded course design […]
