GER assessment needs your students' written work

Dear UAA Colleagues -

As part of UAA’s regular GER assessment process and in preparation for UAA’s October 2021 NWCCU mid-cycle review site visit, a committee of faculty members representing all UAA colleges will be assessing the following GER student learning outcome: Communicate effectively in a variety of contexts and formats. We will be focusing on written communication.

For that, we need your help.

We need student writing from across the curriculum, from all campuses, and from the pre-GenEd to 400-level.

Please consider submitting an assignment (what it is you asked your students to do) and a complete assignment set (the work your students completed) from any of your current Spring 2021 or Fall 2020 classes. The written papers can be of any kind:

• From any course, whether a GenEd course or not.
• From pre-GenEd through 400-level in any discipline.
• From one-page personal responses to major research assignments.
• If possible, please include the assignment sheet or writing prompt and any grading rubric used.

You can submit the full assignment set via a shared link, scanned pdfs, or – even easier – downloaded as a whole from Blackboard. (Simply download an entire assignment set.)

The assessment committee will evaluate the student work using a common rubric based on the AAC&U Value Rubrics and will produce a report that highlights our students’ achievement in written communication and identifies areas where student learning might need to be improved.

Please be assured that: 

1. You do not have to anonymize the student materials. FERPA does not apply for internal assessment work.
2. You do not have to worry about personally identifiable results. Courses are reported only by department and course-level.
3. You do not have to worry about any of the findings affecting P&T or yearly evaluation. We're evaluating student learning in the GER outcomes across the curriculum, not faculty teaching. 

Although GenEd assessment is part of UAA’s accreditation efforts, it is more importantly a way to share the good work faculty are doing across the campuses and to provide a foundation for improving our courses and, of course, student success.

Deadline for submission: Friday, April 2, 2021

Please take a minute to grab a full set of assignments from Bb and help our work in General Education. Please send your materials or address any questions to Dan Kline, GenEd Director, at dtkline@alaska.edu.

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