This year, following the pattern of previous years, the Assessment Team developed an assignment that could be embedded in courses throughout the College to assess student competency in the General Education goal under examination. Again, the process began with the drafting of a rubric that reflects the aspects of the goal that matter most to College faculty. After much consideration, the Team decided to look for demonstrations of skill in four stages of thinking:
Recognizing that critical thinking and verbal fluency may be distinct capabilities, the team decided to offer two different sets of “given” material: one was a newspaper article about car accidents presented in standard paragraph format with accompanying graphics, and the other was a collection of charts representing the chemical composition of six Connecticut lakes, with accompanying brief verbal explanations.See Materials. The assignment for both forms asked students to show their thinking in response to the four stages of the rubric: to identify the pieces of given information that were relevant to a particular question, to organize the selected information, to propose a conclusion or hypothesis based on the organized information, and finally to evaluate the utility of that result within a larger context. See Assignment.
In the fall, four teachers embedded the assignment in eight classes involving 154 students. For embedding details, see Instructions for Teachers (Acrobat Reader file). Norming and scoring of samples led to minor changes for the spring iteration. For details, see Team notes for November 12, 2003, posted on the Student Learning Assessment Team website: http://www.ccc.commnet.edu/slat. The adjusted common assignment was embedded by five teachers in classes that enrolled 311 students representing early, middle, and late stages of study at the College. For details of the embedding distribution, see Participation.
In the fall, the Team scored 36 Critical Thinking samples randomly selected from and equally distributed among the 3 classes that embedded work on the numeric/graphic form “Lakes” and the 3 classes that embedded the journalistic form “Accidents.” In the spring, norming with anchor papers from the fall, the Team scored another 84 samples similarly divided between the two forms. (For detail about scoring methods and emergent reflections, see the notes from the meetings of November 12, March 4, and March 10, available on the website.) Between fall and spring, 120 samples were scored. Unscored samples remain on file in the assessment office. Results are included in the Quantitative Report.