General Education Program Assessment

One fundamental purpose of a liberal education is to ensure the acquisition of knowledge common to educated people and to equip students to integrate acquired knowledge in order to produce interconnections of thoughts and ideas.

Purpose

General Education Learning Goals provide a framework for aligning, designing, delivering, and assessing student learning across the general education curriculum.

Content

Southeast Missouri State University prioritizes seven general education learning goals, as shown in the table below. These institutional goals for student learning align with the four CORE42 learning competencies for the State of Missouri which are:

Valuing
Managing Information
Communicating
Higher Order Thinking

Level of Achievement

The level of achievement for each goal is assessed in multiple ways. The initial assessment utilizes rubrics in the LMS in which faculty teaching those courses score each student’s assignments tied to the particular general education goal. Additionally, on the cycle shown below, peers review random samples of student work and assess it using modified AAC&U Value rubrics. Those results are shared with the faculty and difference and similarities between the scores are discussed.

General Education Learning Goals/Outcomes

Ethical reasoning

Students will demonstrate the ability to assess their own ethical values and the social context of problems, recognize ethical issues in a variety of settings, think about how different ethical perspectives might be applied to ethical dilemmas and consider the ramifications of alternative actions.

Global learning

Students will demonstrate the ability to analyze and engage with complex, interdependent global systems and legacies (such as natural, physical, social, cultural, economic, and political) and their implications for people’s lives and the Earth’s sustainability.

Written communication

Students will demonstrate effective written communication in a variety of contexts and media.

Oral communication

Students will demonstrate effective verbal communication through various channels.

Information literacy

Students will demonstrate the ability to locate, organize, evaluate, and synthesize information from various sources.

Critical thinking

Students will demonstrate the ability to distinguish among opinion, facts, and inferences; to identify underlying or implicit assumptions; to make informed judgments; to solve problems; and to practice reflective thinking.

Quantitative literacy

Students will demonstrate a ‘habit of mind’, competency, and comfort in working with numerical data across a variety of contexts.

Assessment Timeline

Each of the General Education Learning Outcomes is assessed each academic year.

Faculty Assessment Process

All general education courses must have identified primary, secondary, and tertiary goals from the seven general education goals.
Prior to the semester of data collection, the General Education Coordinator meets with faculty teaching a course covering the goal being assessed. The faculty collaboratively develop, refine, or just review the current assessment rubric.
If the faculty are utilizing the LMS, they will ensure the outcome is mapped to the particular assessment in their course.
During the semester of data collection, the faculty will score the assignment identified as being the measure for the general education goal.
The following semester, the General Education Coordinator works with IR and IT to compile the reports regarding student performance and the attainment of the general education goal/outcome.
Results are summarized for institutional reporting and review, and detailed reports are shared with faculty teaching those courses.
The General Education Coordinator schedules a meeting(s) with the faculty to discuss the results and any suggested or needed changes to help improve student performance.
Suggested changes are documented and implemented for the following cycle and those results are compared to previous results to determine if the changes had the desired impacts.
The process repeats.

Peer Review – Secondary Mode of Assessment

On the defined cycle, a group of peer volunteers will evaluate a random sample of student work.
The Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) will randomly pull the determined number of samples
The peer group will score those samples using modified AAC&U VALUE rubrics
Those results will be aggregated, and a report will be generated by the General Education Coordinator.
The results will be shared with the faculty during the assessment meeting and any differences and similarities will be discussed.

General Education Reports

The table below lists the percentages of sampled students each academic year who were rated as meeting or exceeding the benchmarks for our General Education Learning Outcomes.

Student outcomes

	Ethical Reasoning	Global Learning	Written Comm.	Oral Comm.	Information Literacy	Critical Thinking	Quantitative Literacy
Fall 2022	N/A	90%	97%	94%	N/A	88%	N/A
Fall 2023	79%	83%	94%	90%	87%	83%	75%
Fall 2024	78%	74%	87%	92%	83%	86%	74%
Fall 2025	75%	76%	85%	83%	81%	81%	60%

Sample sizes vary from outcome to outcome and from year to year. Declining scores may reflect increases in the size and curricular diversity of the sample.