Introduction

In this blog I plan to reflect on what we’re doing in class and why. I sometimes do this when I teach, and sometimes some students find it somewhat helpful. When I do blog along with a class, it is typically because I am devising or revising a course. For that reason alone, it is worth keeping such a blog. It helps those students who read it insofar as in such a blog I seek to make more transparent what I (or in this case, we, the team) are doing and why we are doing it.

Ultimately, we have a set of student-learning outcomes (called “SLOs” in the scholarship on this stuff), and we believe that those outcomes are valuable for you in the short-term (insofar as they will help you in college) and the long-term (in your life after college). Ideally, all assignments are oriented toward the learning outcomes, and some directly assess those outcomes. Reading questions, for instance, are designed to aid in student comprehension of reading, and this comprehension is a necessary building block; without this block – and others – you will not be able to build the higher-order skills and thus achieve the desired SLOs.

The primary means by which we assess whether and to what extent you’ve achieved the SLOs is, in all sections of Humanities 2001 and 2002, the interdisciplinary essay exam. Our team is seeking a new means of assessing those outcomes – one that will replace the essay exam and, ideally, assess you in a way that makes that assessment more transparent, that makes what we want more clear, and that helps you deliver what we want, which is another way of saying “achieve the desired SLOs.”