General Education Curriculum Committee (Gecco) Meeting Minutes

Approval of the minutes from December 1, 2010. The minutes were discussed and approved.

Announcements: Chair Rob Mentore announced that a Luminus Group had been established and the committee was shown the structure. All files collected for the Writing assessment will be uploaded to this site. Some slight refinements were made to this structure.

There was a reminder of the AAC&U conference in Chicago in March –there was a brief discussion of who might want to go.

Writing Assessment topics of discussion:

The group discussed whether we needed to be concerned about “informed consent” and whether the students needed to be consulted. Rob informed us that he had talked about this with the IRB Committee and was advised that this case is “exempt.”

Discussion of the recruitment of readers – we were able to recruit 16 readers to do the rating of the writing samples.

We decided to send out a friendly reminder to faculty who are part of the assessment to make sure they remember to collect the papers.

Other Business: Discussion of the meeting schedule for spring 2011 was decided - we decided that some of our scheduled meeting times would be times for our subcommittees to meet.

Presentation on the AAC&U meeting, summer 2010:

Gladys Torres- Baumgarten gave a presentation on the work that was done at the AAC&U meeting in Summer 2010. Ashwani presented the option of using “Concept Mapping” software as a way to get a clear picture of how stakeholders understand the SLOs. Topics included ways to define and more precisely articulate SLOs, as well as ways to do quantitative analysis to get a clearer sense of what people felt.

After questions and clarifications, Meredith Davis and Jim Woodley said that they liked the idea of using this software to get a sense of what is envisioned for categories that are amorphous such as Intercultural North America, International Issues, etc.

Sam Mustafa suggested that in we should not go in this direction but should focus at first on classes where the SLOs are relatively straightforward, rather than start with the upper level classes.

The concern was raised that redesign and assessment should not be confused. In response, other members of the committee stated that they felt that redesign was implicit in the GECCo charge. Finally, Sam Mustafa and others agreed that this software might well help to ask the larger questions of what stakeholders think about student learning outcomes.

Monika Giacoppe asked about implementation – how could we get the entire faculty involved in this?

Professors Torres-Baumgarten and Vasishth shared some of the other topics that came up in the AAC&U conference – including the suggestion of a communication committee to help with “buy in” and use the FRC to do more of this.

It was suggested that we should know what percentage of the faculty teach in the GE program. Can we identify faculty who teach GE? How?

Proposal from the Chair:

Rob Mentore presented a proposal for a 4th subcommittee that would study the curriculum, audit syllabi and determine which skills and concepts are being learned in the current Gen Ed. Beba Shamash was unclear of what would be accomplished with this committee. Others also expressed some confusion as to how this subcommittee was different from the SLO subcommittee.

Jim Woodley felt that there was enough oversight within the school or program in many cases. Rob Mentore suggested that we could do a syllabus audit as part of the writing assessment.

Rick Nunez was concerned that we can’t understand all of the writing assignments in a class from the materials that we collect.

Discussion of an email received from the Diversity Action Committee:

The group had a discussion of an email received from the DAC in an effort to understand what they were asking of us. It was agreed that we were unclear.

Respectfully submitted,

Meredith Davis