Review Assessment Report

Our general education program aims to develop scientific habits of mind and scientific reasoning in our students. Mastery of the skills assessed as part of our general education assessment program are part of a larger framework we have designed to help students become proficient in basic scientific inquiry and reasoning, as well as critical consumers of science journalism and media. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have developed a suite of general education science courses that are available both online and face-to-face. This has increased our ability to meet the needs of our students and thus help them fulfill their degree requirements.

The only target above that was not met was the average class fill rate at 60% or above capacity for 2021-2022. We were well above in 2019-2020 and 2020-2021, but fell 2% short in 2021-2022. Our decreased fill rate was due to our decision to let some low-enrollment courses at Montoya and Westside run to keep face-to-face options for students that prefer face-to-face classes.

Our students performed exceptionally well on the essential skills assessed in both PHYS 1310L and ASTR 1010L. The essential skills were assessed using in-class labs for the face-to-face classes and equivalent online lab activities for the distance learning sections. The labs require students to do investigations, interpret graphs, make calculations, evaluate statements, and draw conclusions, all while working in groups. The toughest essential skills were problem setting for our physics students and evidence acquisition for our astronomy students. The average scores on these essential skills were still acceptable (1.50 out of 2 and 1.42 out of 2, respectively) but are areas on which we may wish to place more emphasis in the future. Our first step, however, will be to change our rubric to expand the scale and more finely delineate points. This will allow us to better assess exactly what aspect of each essential skill is most difficult for our students.

Revise our rubrics such that their scale is from 0 to 3 instead of 0 to 2.

We feel that requiring a perfect score of 2/2 to meet the criteria of passing an assessment is too strict, yet a score of 1/2 is too lenient. This year we opted to use 2/2, but if we scale our rubric differently, we can use a score of 2 out of 3 to be the minimum for passing an assessment, and that would roughly mirror our requirement of having a 70% or better in a course to pass. This will also allow us to more finely delineate partial credit, giving us more insight into what aspects of each skill are most difficult for our students. Revising our rubric will give us a better sense for how many students have adequate achievement on our essential skills and how to make curriculum changes to support them.