2008 GenEd Pilot Study Critical Thinking Assessment Loop

Eastern Oregon University

General Education Assessment

2008 Spring Pilot Project:

Critical Thinking Outcome

Closing the Loop: Project Reflections

ART 101: FOUNDATIONS OF VISUAL LITERACY

Closing the Loop on Assessment: Comment holistically on how well students achieved the learning outcome you were assessing against this rubric. Is there anything you would change next time to improve the design of the activity/assignment so as to improve the outcome?

Over all the results seemed fairly promising. One point of concern might be the “ability to recognize context and assumptions” category in which more students were scored as adequate rather than proficient. One way to address this would be to build in another abstract thinking exercise where students were asked to predict results based on assumptions of societal norms or stereotypes.

PHIL 102: Ethics, Politics, and Law

1. On this particular assignment the vast majority of students demonstrated Critical Thinking skills.

2. This is due in part to the fact that I designed my prompts to engage Critical Thinking.

3. The assignment was so successful that I will be using it as a model in both PHIL 101 and PHIL 102.

4. Taking responsibility for excerpting difficult reading paid off substantially in the quality of the papers.

5. The fact that the argument for a home for a constitutional right to privacy that the Court ultimately decided on (and which I believe is the strongest) failed to receive any student support clearly indicates the need for greater emphasis in the lectures.

6. I strongly believe that our prompt needs to be revised to talk not only about “evaluating evidence,” but also “marshalling evidence” to support the student’s thesis.

ANTH 101: INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Closing the Loop on Assessment: The students did well on this activity. The majority were able to convey information from multiple perspectives. They also were able to make a clear argument from a single perspective on a controversial issue involving religious rights and diversity. The quiz was conducted during the 8th week of classes and the students had the opportunity to discuss religious diversity in small groups as well as in class discussion. More discussion in class as well as a research assignment on religious diversity might have helped the students that fell within the adequate and developing categories.

CHEM 206: GENERAL CHEMISTRY

The results of this assessment do not reflect the overall current performance of students in this class. Only about two thirds of the students displayed adequate to proficient critically thinking skills and ability to solve the given problems.

This may be due in part to the difficult nature of the material covered in this particular assessment.

In question # 1, I was testing the ability of students to use different approaches in calculating the pH of acids and bases depending on the strength of the acid or base. Obviously, quite a few students were unable to recognize the difference between strong and weak acids/bases or unable to apply the correct strategy to each specific case.

In question # 2, I was testing the ability of students to recognize salts that, when dissolved in water, produce solutions with pH other than 7. Most students have the misconception that all salts will produce neutral solutions, much like sodium chloride does. This is a difficult misconception to eradicate and these results demonstrate that, in spite of many examples discussed in class, about one third of the class still is unable to recognize whether a given caution or anion derives from a strong or a weak acid/base and deduce that certain species will produce a pH different than 7.

In question # 3 I was testing the ability of students to recognize different types of titrations and related characteristics. While most students were able to recognize the different categories of titrations, I was amazed that only 2 of 42 students were able to answer the first part of the question. This indicates that students do not understand that the volume required to reach the equivalent point of a titration is only a function of volumes and concentrations and not the type of species involved. Maybe I put so much emphasis in my lectures in identifying the type of titrations that I assumed calculations about the equivalent point would be obvious.

Part of the reason so many students failed to achieve proficiency in this assessment may also be due to the type of activities. Both questions # 2 and # 3 did not require calculations. They rather required that students be able to rank according to certain criteria. Although we have done similar exercises in class and as part of homework assignments, most problems of the type proposed in this assessment have been approached with calculations. Obviously, many students are still unable to apply their skills to the same type of problems proposed in a different format. Considering that this is a freshman level course, I need to make sure that ample examples of different types of assessments be presented to students in advance.

Finally, I would like to point out that the category of “perspectives” does not apply to this particular assessment. A better category would be “approaches”.

ENGL 316: APPROCAHES TO GRAMMAR

1. On this particular assignment the vast majority of students demonstrated Critical Thinking skills.

2. This is due in part to the fact that the students are upper division EDUC and ENGL majors and due in part to the fact I design my prompts to engage Critical Thinking.

3. In fact, this was the 9th assignment in the course, so students had been developing their Critical Thinking abilities for a few weeks and getting feedback from me directing think to reflect more critically. In addition, I had provided models in class of how to more fully explore the concepts they are asked to write about.

4. It is good to know that my prompts and the use of modeling successfully elicits Critical Thinking just as I hoped, albeit intuitively and holistically with other Gen Ed outcomes: The same samples could be used to assess other Gen Ed outcomes.

5. On a subsequent assignment fewer students achieved the Proficient level, which suggests the prompt makes a lot of difference and this kind of snapshot of skills can be somewhat misleading.

6. I realized that I should be clearer about the Critical Thinking traits I am expecting by using the rubric, traits, and language created by EPCC.

7. This assessment suggests, depending on the results of the other faculty engaged in this Pilot Study, that we might have a fruitful cross-curricular dialog about effective prompts and pedagogical practice to enhance the Critical Thinking our Gen Ed students, that we might be able to reinforce this outcome across the disciplines by explicitly using the same language in talking about Critical Thinking in our Gen Ed courses.

PSYCH 335: COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

The first research report in this course was done with a draft, so students received peer comments and comments from me prior to submitting the final paper. The second report did not require a draft. Students actually did less well, on average, on the second report than on the first. This was not what I had expected. In general, students did meet the critical thinking outcomes for explanations, contexts, and perspectives, but the “evaluating evidence” outcome was the weakest here. It is probably the most challenging skill for this course. Making sense of the outcome of one experiment does not necessarily transfer to making sense of the outcome or another experiment, particularly for students who are novices in these endeavors. In the papers, the students did well on the Method section, not so well on the Results section, and the framework sections (Introduction and Discussion) were variable in quality.

One possible improvement would be for the second paper to include a peer commentary day on drafts. Because the students are all writing about the same experiment, they could benefit from seeing how other students described the results. Another option would be to have students work in pairs to outline the key aspects of the results and the logic of how to use that evidence to draw conclusions before they write their individual reports. With either of these options, the idea is that additional practice with the results will lead to better written explanations of the results in the students’ final papers.