We’re hoping to close the WEAVE-assessment tool down for a couple of days in March. As a result, we’re pushing to have all 2006 Fall academic program assessments and all other FY 2006 assessments completed on or before 15 March 2007. We’ll then take a couple of days to process and review the info - and then we’ll open up the next assessment cycle for everyone.

If you’re having trouble with your WEAVE account, please contact Metta or Richard.

The folks at WEAVEonline have updated their help feature and now include more information about technical issues.  Even so, if you get stumped while you’re working in or with Weave, feel free to contact us at assess@utdallas.edu.  We’ll get back to you as quickly as possible to help resolve your issue.

On another front, we’ll soon close out the 2005-2006 assessment year and roll into the 2006-2007 year.  As much as possible, we’d like to have all of the 2006 fiscal year and the 2006 calendar year completed before February 1st.

If you have questions about any of the report sections in Weave, feel free to contact Metta; she’s become quite the expert and is happy to help.

10:30 a.m., CN 1.206

Attendees: Julie Allen, Metta Alsobrook, Andrew Blanchard, Duane Buhrmester, Juan Gonzalez, Richard Huckaba, Varghese Jacob, Simon Kane, Serenity King, Abby Kratz, Dennis Kratz, Kimberly Leonard, Ramona Metcalf, Inga Musselman, Jody Nelsen, Robert Nelsen, JoyLynn Reed, Donna Rogers, Myron Salamon, Sue Sherbet, Emily Tobey

Points of Discussion

• Status of reports in WEAVEonline
• Program Luncheon agenda for Friday’s meeting with Program Heads
• Program audit for revision
• Material for assessment & evaluation prior to WEAVEonline implementation
• Program Evaluator checklist
• In-house form developed to summarize the assessment and evaluation model
• Modeled after UTEP experience with on-site reviewer
• Provides overview of the process and avoids excessive detail
• New core curriculum course objectives
• Friendly amendment to Natural Science objective #3 based on comments from Dean Salamon
• Division of responsibility for core curriculum assessment
• SACS, CELT, Assessment Team and Core Curriculum Committee responsiblities
• Compliance Certification Reports
• Common Problems
• Current delays in submission may be affecting other report writers who need to reference the material in another report
• Assistance from SACS Team, especially Editor Serenity King
• Types of items to include in report and in supporting documentation
• Syllabus Submission Tool update & demo
• Status of Graduate Committee report, including documentation still needed from various programs
• Status of Faculty Credentialing report

Meeting adjourned 11:36 a.m.

Communication (010)

1. Students will be able to write in different ways for different audiences. (This goal applies for RHET 1302 courses only.)
2. Students will be able to write effectively using appropriate organization, mechanics, and style.
3. Students will be able to construct effective written arguments.
4. Students will be able to gather, incorporate, and interpret source material in their writing.

Natural Science (030)

1. Students will be able to describe laws, theories or findings basic to the science discipline.
2. Students will be able to apply scientific laws and principles of the discipline to arrive at problem solutions.
3. Students will be able to explain how experiments or observations validate or test scientific concepts. (This goal applies for all NS courses and is the goal to be used for laboratory courses.) [This 3rd objective was updated on 8 January 2007.] ["or observations" added 10 January 2007]

Social and Behavioral Science (080)

1. Students will be able to describe major theoretical and scholarly approaches, empirical findings, and historical trends in the social/behavioral science discipline.
2. Students will be able to describe and apply basic research methods in the social/behavioral science discipline.
3. Students will be able to apply modes of critical thinking used in the social/behavioral science discipline.

Thursday morning, Duane Buhrmester and Robert Nelsen met to discuss the role of the Core Curriculum Committee members as the committee has taken primary responsibility for the assessment planning and reporting for the common core. The processes currently in place will stand, for the most part. However, a few changes will appear shortly.

For example, the current assessment tool (see sacs.utdallas.edu/sacs_tools) provides faculty members a template for posting their planning and reporting information for the core courses. Within each template, boxes pop open to allow editing; faculty can simply review without opening the editing tool. We currently generate a list of core courses and sections with the pertinent information, ship out emails to those faculty members, and then monitor their progress throughout the term. To now, the assessment team inside SACS has been working with most of this, using the tools Simon built for this purpose.

Ahead, however, the committee will be doing more of the monitoring and reviewing. The committee will notify faculty members of the deadlines and basic requirements. The committee will refer to the assessment team and the CELT team (that’s Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching) any faculty members who may be having difficulty with the tool or with the assessment lingo. Additionally, Dr. Buhrmester has asked for a specific report (that will appear inside the report monkey tool - yes, that’s what it’s called now) to facilitate his review and auditing of the plans and report throughout the term.Dr. Buhrmester has agreed to re-write some of the FAQ’s for the assessment tool in hopes of providing more specific information for each block of required information. This info will address such questions as “What is a good objective?” or “What kind of assessment activities are appropriate?” or even “Okay, if I have assessment results, how is that different from an analysis of the outcomes or the evaluation of the whole objective?”

Another change comes from a change in the objectives in Communication, Natural Sciences, and Social Sciences. The Committee agreed to some relatively minor changes in the objectives - and these modified objectives will serve as the springboard for faculty in writing their course-specific objectives (or student learning outcomes).

All of this is in progress - and we anticipate opening the assessment tool to the faculty within the next few days. (What would be the point of opening this before classes actually start, anyway?)

(”Are you having fun yet?”)

The question has now been posed:  Is there a core curriculum for graduate students?  The answer appears to be “Maybe.”  Defining that core curriculum, however, leads to another question:  To what extent can one define the common underpinnings of a graduate education?

If there are common elements among graduate programs, would they not focus on a graduate student’s basic understanding of the foundation literature of the discipline?  Would they not also focus on an opportunity to strengthen the student’s skills as a researcher, whether that research is lab-based or literature-based?  Would such foundation skills be evidenced within the majority of the course work within the student’s degree program?  Perhaps more important, however, is a related question:  If these elements occur across the breadth of the curriculum, does this constitute a core curriculum for graduate students or something else, perhaps a learning objectives set that permeates the entire program and, thus, is something more than a core curriculum?

Regardless of that last question, it seems appropriate to tie such skills or objectives to a number of programs or program elements that encompass the entire curriculum.  To that extent, we should determine what that set of elements truly includes and then tie those elements to the various graduate programs at UTD.  In so doing, we take yet another step toward demonstrating our having carefully and seriously considered not only the value of a graduate education at UTD but also our willingness to structure the learning experience to suit the needs of our students and the community-at-large.

During Summer 2006, UTD is systematically assessing the courses in the core curriculum, the so-called “General Education” courses.  Faculty members teaching these sections have been asked to provide a general assessment plan and will be asked to follow up with the results of their assessment measures by 22 September 2006.  This is an important step in finalizing the overall assessment strategy at UTD for all academic programs; working with a finite set of courses provides the assessment team a good opportunity to improve the assessment plan templates before the fall assessment period begins. 

Kudos to JoyLynn Reed and Robert Nelsen for working with so many faculty members to generate these assessment plan templates; and special thanks to Duane Buhrmester for his tireless efforts to provide constructive feedback.