Microcredentialing in Gen Ed

One of the challenges we are having at my institution concerns our General Education curriculum. This is not a bad challenge to have--it means we are trying to figure out ways to ensure that our students leave with a degree that represents something more than training or subject-specific learning. Rather, they need to know what a well-educated person should know in a democratic society. Following the LEAP framework, we ask that students leave with general knowledge of human cultures and the physical world, a set of intellectual and practical skills (things like critical thinking, effective communication skills, information literacy, quantitative literacy, etc.), and an understanding of personal and social responsibility. And they should know how to apply all of these skills and knowledge.

As I say, that's all great, but the challenge lies in, first, how do you make sure your courses contain ways to teach these things, and ways to assess them effectively, and second, how do you cram all of this in when requirements for majors or areas of study are gradually increasing to include more of the curriculum? Many students are choosing double majors, or to have multiple minors, meaning there is very little room for elective courses.

In a discussion with the dean of our school of arts and sciences and the director of learning outcomes assessment, it became clear that our current approach is less than ideal, for a couple of reasons:

1. It's course-based. This means that taking two courses in writing allows a student to fulfill the writing requirement, regardless of whether he or she needs to write in other courses, or at a more advanced level of skill for a particular degree program. It also ghettoizes gen ed: I find it ironic that the Diversity requirement can be satisfied here with a single course. That seems to me to be the definition of not-diverse.

2. It leads to assessment creep. Once you determine what a student should know and be able to do upon leaving your institution, it becomes incumbent on you to determine whether your students have met your standards. That's not a bad thing, either, but, as Christopher Nelson of St. John's College has written, "Current assessment models habitually and almost obsessively understate the responsibility of the student for his or her own learning, and, what is more consequential, overstate the responsibility of the teacher." The implication of this: perhaps, rather than testing everything we want students to learn, it might be enough in some cases to make sure we are providing an environment that promotes learning, and not test every outcome we think students should achieve. In fact, we can't do it--there is too much.

There have been several approaches to the assessment of gen ed, many of them effective, but we have a unique situation at my institution. All of our students are adult learners, and most of them come to us with credits from other institutions, sometimes earned long ago, as well as learning they have gained from non-academic settings: work, military, hobbies, you name it. While we might try to embed assessment of gen ed outcomes in our courses, what if a student transferred in that one diversity course from another institution? We've missed our chance at assessing their DQ (diversity quotient--yes, I know this is problematic).

So what do we do? Well, for the moment, not much. But here is an idea: we know there are some outcomes--like writing and critical thinking, for instance--that we need to assess, both for our sake and our students'. Then there are outcomes that we think students should have, but we can't really assess: lifelong learning, for example. How do you assess that now? Wouldn't you need to follow up with students ten or twenty years down the road to see if they are still committed to a continuous learning process? And then the tough one for us: civic engagement. We want our students to have this, but should we force it on them? Should we assess it in a standardized way?

What if we could make the process a more active one for students? We can require some competencies--critical thinking, quantitative literacy--to be assessed, and others we leave up to the student to decide. Do you want it noted on your transcript that you demonstrated mastery in the area of Diversity? Complete the assessment. Don't want anyone ever accusing you of understanding other cultures? Skip that one, then. This would free up some of the curriculum to allow students to focus on some of the topics they really care about, and to have some recognition when students do go out of their way to earn it. So a university transcript could include ten Gen Ed competencies, or none. If you really wanted to be passive aggressive about it, your transcript could include a statement like: "Out of a maximum of 14 Gen Ed assessments, Junior here completed 2. What a guy."

This would also be a way to begin integrating a competency-based approach into a traditional curriculum: you can keep your courses if you like them so much, but you could make sure to include threads on Gen Ed topics like Ethics that would run throughout numerous areas of the curriculum and link courses together, thus allowing students to show what they know and can do.