General Education, CSU, Chico

GE Program Assessment

General Education is more than a collection of courses; it is an academic program.  Like all academic programs, GE needs to be periodically reviewed to ensure that it is current, meeting its goals, efficient and contributing to rigorous student learning.  However, GE has some unique organizational characteristics that make its review more difficult.  Unlike a department or discipline-based program, the faculty who teach GE are scattered across the university, with little sense of identity as “General Education faculty.”  Hence, it is difficult to convene the faculty to discuss the program and its assessment, to reflect on assessment results and to meaningfully propose and adopt program improvements.

A concerted effort at GE Program assessment was carried out in AY 04-05 and 05-06.  The reports of these efforts were widely shared with the campus and are available at the links below.  These results raise as many questions as they answer.  They show some strengths in terms of student learning, but some real gaps as well.  While some follow-up has proceeded based on these assessment results, including writing workshops focused on enhancing writing instruction across the curriculum, including in GE and discussion of steps to infuse quantitative reasoning more purposefully across the GE curriculum, we still have a long way to go to make these results consequential, to convene meaningful dialogue on GE and to take active steps to improve our General Education program.

Given the importance of GE to our students’ education, isn’t it time for this discussion?