Ritual Compliance: Assessment of General Learning Outcomes in a Community College History Department

The tuning project at the AHA is recognition of the changing landscape of higher education.  Some of these changes have come from honest reflection within the profession while others are the result of outside pressure from legislatures, accrediting organizations, and administrators.  Their rallying cry has been “accountability,” which has left many institutions and history departments scrambling for exactly how to design and measure student learning outcomes (SLOs) for history survey courses.  These measurements must assess content specific outcomes as well as general education outcomes.  Community colleges are often the first to confront these issues allowing them to become both laboratories for innovative teaching and graveyards for failed methods.  This paper will look at attempts within a history department at a community college in southeast Houston to assess general education outcomes in the U.S. History survey.

            The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) mandated that colleges measure general education outcomes in critical thinking skills, social responsibility, communication skills, and personal responsibility, but the organization allowed each institution to develop its own assessment methods.  The college in this study adopted an institutional portfolio method that uses common assignments within each discipline to measure competency. The intention was to balance the assessment needs with faculty autonomy, but the results have been mixed.  The assessment project has suffered from real and perceived threats to faculty’s academic freedom resulting in limited faculty support for any aspect of the project.  The rubrics have proven challenging to both designers and evaluators of the common assignments.  Additionally, there are problems of scale as campus officials rely on volunteer faculty from across all disciplines to evaluate the mountain of assignments.   Sharing the experiences from this college might help it and other institutions develop more effective assessment tools for general education and discipline specific learning outcomes.