The assessment of the General Education Core Curriculum has been implemented through a variety of crosscutting approaches under the auspices of the Core Curriculum Oversight Committee and the Office of Assessment. The Core Curriculum Oversight Committee recently initiated the first of an expected annual survey, which asks faculty to rate student performance for critical thinking, writing, reading, and mathematics. The results of the survey and follow-up faculty discussion will be shared with the CCOC to inform it about strengths and weaknesses of the Core courses and about teaching-and-learning related issues in the Core courses.
In another approach based on a directive from the CU Board of Regents, general education performance in the areas of critical thinking, writing, reading, and mathematics is assessed through a standardized assessment known as ETS Proficiency Profile (formerly the Measure of Academic Proficiency and Progress, or MAPP). The results of the 2009-2010 test revealed that CU Denver students are performing on par with or above students at comparison universities and that seniors outperformed freshmen on the total test and on all sub-measures, suggesting that a CU Denver education makes a valuable difference in students' learning.
The bulk of the CU Denver Core Curriculum courses is located in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS). In each of the knowledge areas of core, CLAS has identified key general education outcomes and has designed assessments specific to those outcomes. This plan was piloted in Summer 2009 and undertaken on a large scale for the first time in Fall 2009. The plan and initial reports are available on the CLAS web site.
Under the Director of Assessment, CU Denver formed the General Education Assessment Advisory Committee for the Fall 2009 to provide oversight and recommendations on the various strategies for assessing student learning for general education outcomes and for using the information to advance teaching and learning in general education courses. During the 2008/2009 academic year, the university also analyzed the assessment practices related to the first-year experience and undergraduate learning, of which general education is a major component, in the Foundations of Excellence (FoE) program. The Foundations of Excellence identified a number of useful and potentially valuable assessments of academic performance of first-year students at CU Denver, including: ACT/SAT scores, student remediation test results, mathematics and English placement testing, D/F/W/I non-completion rates, Early Alert, First-Year Seminar grades, National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) data, Faculty Survey of Student Engagement (FSSE) data, Faculty Course Questionnaires (FCQs) data, and student summer orientation surveys. The FoE evaluation concluded that while some of the assessments, such as Early Alert, are put to effective use, other assessments, such as NSSE and FSSE data, add little to the understanding of the first-year experience and are poorly communicated between units of the university. Plans are underway to review all of the assessments of undergraduate education and the first-year experience and to put to more effective use the assessments that are carried out.