Assessment of the General Education

What is Assessment of the General Education?  

There's a good list of examples on our Resources page. The "general education" is the overall set of competencies, dispositions, habits of mind, and experiences Trinity College wants all students to cultivate regardless of students' individual academic plans (majors, minors, or certificates). The Trinity College curriculum can be accessed online. The variability of the Trinity College curriculum requires a flexible approach to general education assessment to consider whether Trinity graduates meet our learning expectations for various domains of the liberal education -- including critical thinking, intercultural engagement and understanding, and ethical reasoning.

Duke's regional accreditor, SACSCOC, expects institutions to document and communicate how it maintains regularized and rigorous assessment processes for the General Education.  For more information, see Section 8.2.b. of the 2018 Principles of Accreditation Resource Manual.  

Assessment usually occurs most authentically in the context of a course, degree program, or co-curricular learning experience. And we argue that Duke and other institutions should persist in promoting authentic, embedded assessment in their courses and programs. However, because SACSCOC and other stakeholders also desire generalizable evidence of learning across the curriculum and co-curriculum, we utilize a parallel effort at the college level, to enrich and explain local observations of learning.

The Methodology

In April 2024, the Arts & Sciences Council will be voting on a proposal for a new general education curriculum for students in Trinity College.  If passed, the Dean of Academic Affairs will charge the Director of University Assessment with convening a faculty committee to design and implement an assessment strategy for the general education.  

In the recent past, the College assessed the general education through a canon of normed tests issued to first- and fourth-year students.  That project started in summer 2010 and continued annually through 2023. The Office of Assessment administered several assessment instruments prior to students’ matriculation at Duke, and then again as student approach graduation. Each instrument focused on a core student learning outcome.  The student sample was voluntary -- incoming first year (non-transfer) students, A&S and Engineering. To reduce students' assessment responsibilities, each matriculating cohort was divided into four roughly equal subgroups, where each subgroup received the invitation to one of the four instruments in use in Trinity College.  

Data collection for matriculating students began each May, with periodic reminders in July and August, ending at the start of first year student orientation. Graduating seniors received their task invitations in February-April of their graduating year. These graduates were invited to take the same test as in their first year to enable repeated measurement. This approach allowed Trinity College to gather baseline data pertaining to incoming students’ levels of ethical reasoning, global perspectives, critical thinking, and quantitate literacy and reasoning and to follow the development of student competencies, broadly defined, over time. When samples are large enough, aggregated and de-identified findings are shared with individual A&S departments and programs to help supplement the localized assessment activities underway within those programs.

The tests in use in Trinity College include: