Tracking Outcomes

The outcomes of the program are determined in three ways.

1. Course grade distributions are a measure of the outcomes of the Basic Skills courses. This is appropriate because each department teaching a Basic Skills class has a rubric (that is shared with students) for evaluating outcomes. The departments teaching the courses provide grade distributions, including withdrawals, and an analysis of problems encountered in ensuring that students are achieving the appropriate learning outcomes.
    
2. We interview a sample of graduating seniors who took all of their general education coursework at WSU to obtain both a student’s perspective of the program as a whole and of their attainment of the skills and perspectives that the program is supposed to provide. Students who have completed the program can speak to all aspects of it and, by the time they are seniors, are more likely to be able to assess the value to them of the program. Interview questions include some that probe student behavior as an appropriate measure of outcomes.
    
3. Individual departments provide feedback to the general education committee as part of the regular program assessment cycle. Instructors who teach General Education courses are asked to provide appropriate assessment of student learning outcomes, including (but not limited to) pretest-posttest models. In the year that a given tier of courses are assessed by the General Education committee, instructors of those classes will be asked to provide statements of how they assessed learning outcomes and the nature of the results.