Outcomes-based Assessment By Tammie Cumming
David Smith, City Tech’s Pathways representative and a member of the School of Technology and Design Assessment Committee mentioned that “City Tech is well-poised to implement the Pathways initiative, as our Gen Ed development committee has been investigating an outcomes based analysis for the last couple of years. It was interesting to me that when the Pathways committee met, many of their source documents had already been explored by the City Tech Gen Ed committee. The basic set of learning outcomes meshed very well to our draft document, and I anticipate very little modification to our development of a modified Gen Ed curriculum will be required.”
Photograph by George Lowe
Outcomes-based assessment is gaining prominence in higher education as evidenced by the movement of regional and professional accreditation governing bodies moving toward this type of assessment. Perhaps the most dramatic case has been the American Board of Engineering and Technology (ABET), but there are others as well, including the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE). City Tech has programs accredited by each of these professional accrediting bodies. Outcomes-based assessment provides an opportunity for educators to view their courses and curricula from a different perspective than from one that considers education primarily in terms of inputs. The “checklist” approach where an institution designates a particular set of courses for students to take and when the course count is completed, assumes that the inputs (courses on the checklist) provided for students will lead to certain outcomes, the knowledge, skills, and other attributes we believe our graduates should possess. An outcomes-based approach to education does not rely only on this assumption. Rather, with an outcomes-based approach, the faculty members have the opportunity to identify the educational outcomes for a program, including its Gen Ed program, and then evaluate the program according to its effectiveness in enabling students to achieve those outcomes.
CUNY is considering a cross-curricular approach to defining Gen Ed requirements to help students experience a seamless transfer process between CUNY colleges within the CUNY Pathways to Degree Completion (“Pathways”) initiative. Under consideration as a framework to develop Gen Ed across the colleges within the system, the Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) model is being reviewed by the committee. The LEAP model, adopted at many American universities, tends to lean toward overarching learning outcomes that transcend curricular areas – and works well for an outcomes-based approach. According to CUNY’s Director of Assessment, Raymond Moy, “With outcomes based assessments, it is what the student does not end up forgetting that counts.” This emphasizes the importance of Gen Ed in students’ everyday lives beyond their experience at City Tech. Gen Ed competencies, such as teamwork, information literacy, ethics, writing, quantitative reasoning, and oral communication, to name several, are important skills for a person to be an effective citizen in the world of work and in our ever-increasing complex global world.
Gen Ed Assessment Committee members: (left to right) J.Zhang, R.Guidone, L.Leng, M.Maklan-Zimberg, S.Cho, A.Zhang, B.Grumet, G.Ossola, D.Smith, L.Pope-Fischer, H.Sisco, R.Alcendor, T.Walker, A.Sena, S.Brandt, S.Phillip, E.Kontzamanis, L.Cai, A.Aptekar, M.Gellar, D.Moody, J.Montgomery, D.Davis, D.Alter
Nucleus: A Faculty Commons Quarterly Volume 3 – Issue 1
September 2011 15