While we should focus on the importance of the Core for our students’ long-term educational success, ultimately, the THECB and SACS do require information about the effectiveness of our Core Curriculum in the form of assessment.  When we approach the assessment process, it is important to remember that it is assessment of the Core Curriculum, not assessment of your individual classes.  Your individual classes simply provide the vehicles for implementing the instruments by which we assess.  In many cases it is also true that your courses are those in which students acquire the knowledge they are demonstrating on the assessment, but we are never evaluating the quality of a single class or department.  We cannot expect, for example, a single course to be responsible for a student’s overall sense of personal responsibility when we hope that the student has taken a number of Core courses that have helped develop personal responsibility.

Signature Assignments

The details of the Core Curriculum approval process are provided below, but here is a sneak peek to help you understand the assessment process.  During the process of developing a Core course, you will develop “signature assignments.”  These are specific course assignments that will be used in all sections of the course and that are designed to measure students’ mastery of the Core objectives tied to your courses.  For example, every course in the Core is required to assess students’ communication skills. The metrics we recommend are found on the UNT communication rubric (which can, itself, be found at curriculum.unt.edu.  Your department, then, would create an assignment that would prompt students to produce some work—some artifact—that could be evaluated using that metric.  That is a signature assignment.  Every section of that course would, in turn, use that assignment.

Each Core objective must be assessed through a signature assignment.  However, you do not need to have four assignments.  It is quite possible to have a single signature assignment that incorporates two, three, or even all four of the Core objectives tied to a course.  For example, an essay assignment might require students to demonstrate communication skills but also require students to engage in critical thinking in the process of developing its content.  If it includes a reflective component, it might also address personal responsibility.  It may take some creativity, but you can definitely combine objectives into a single assignment. The Director of the Core can help you streamline your assessment obligations as much as possible.

Individual Assessment Method

The assignments are the instrument for assessment, but the actual measurement is the final objective of this process.  To that end, when you create a Core course, you choose whether to use the individual assessment method or submit the course for the communal assessment process.  If you choose the individual assessment method, you will follow the following steps listed below:

1. You will define the metric you will use to evaluate your signature assignments.  While the Office of the Core Curriculum recommends you use the UNT core rubrics—because they are most likely to be approved by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board—you may choose an alternative method for measuring the output of your instrument (your assignment).
2. You will create a benchmark for success.  For example, if the course is using the UNT critical thinking rubric, the highest score an individual assignment might earn is a 20.  The department might set as a benchmark that “at least 75% of the students will achieve a score of 15 or higher.”
3. Your instructors will use the appropriate metric to evaluate student work in their classes and report the data to the Chair or a designated faculty or staff member.  Instructors should evaluate all four objectives for each course each semester it is taught.
4. The Chair or designated faculty or staff member will submit the information through the TracDat data management system.

Communal Assessment Method

If departments do not elect the individual assessment method, they must elect the communal assessment method.  The communal assessment process is spearheaded by the Office of the Core Curriculum with significant help from the Oversight Committee for the Core Curriculum.  Furthermore, it relies on significant numbers of volunteer faculty members.

The Office of the Core Curriculum tackles three Core objectives each year: communication, social responsibility, and teamwork during odd/even academic years; and critical thinking, personal responsibility, and empirical/quantitative methods during even/odd academic years.  This schedule is posted at http://curriculum.unt.edu/content/core-curriculum, an it will be distributed to Department Chairs every semester. 

Faculty members teaching each Core course (or designed faculty member from their department) will collect student work in electronic format, either by downloading that work from the Canvas LMS or by scanning physical copies. Instructions on downloading all student work from a course into a single zip file will be provided by the Director of the Core every semester. The faculty or designee will be added as an instructor in a special Canvas shell and will be responsible for uploading the student work as files in that Canvas course for later analysis. 

Once the Office of the Core Curriculum has this the sample of student work from the communal assessment courses, the actual scoring begins.  To facilitate faculty schedules, actual scoring will take place the following fall in the weeks shortly after classes begin.  After a brief training session, volunteers will be encouraged to work during Friday shifts, using the UNT rubrics, to score the student work.  (Scorers may also work independently, but working with groups is preferred.)  The UNT rubrics can be found here.

The whole process looks something like this: