Enhanced General Education

Â鶹ÃÛÌÒAV Enhanced Gen Ed Assessment Plan

Student Learning Outcomes

Â鶹ÃÛÌÒAV's General Education curriculum seeks to enhance skills most applicable in the 21st century global community. Its design directly supports the University of South Florida's commitment to deliver a competitive undergraduate program that generates knowledge, fosters intellectual development, and ensures students' success in a global environment. There are nine student learning outcomes (SLOs) that are assessed at the institutional level. 

  1. Communication: Students will produce well-organized, well-developed communications that reflect appropriate use of language to achieve a specific purpose and address specific audiences.
  2. Critical and Analytical Thinking: Students will comprehensively explore issues, ideas, artifacts, and events before accepting or formulating any opinions or conclusions.
  3. Problem Solving: Students will design, evaluate, and implement a strategy to answer open-ended questions or achieve desired goals.
  4. Creative Thinking: Students will summarize or interpret existing ideas, images, or expertise in original ways.
  5. Information and Data Literacy: Students will identify, locate, evaluate, and effectively and responsibly use and share information for the problems at hand.
  6. Cultural Competence: Students will demonstrate an understanding of the range of human experiences.
  7. Civic Engagement: Students will participate in activities of personal and public concern while recognizing ethical issues and assessing their own ethical values.
  8. Experiential Learning: Students will synthesize connections among experiences outside of the formal classroom.
  9. Quantitative Reasoning: Students will show an understanding of many quantative skills, including interpreting evidence, modeling complex systems, and drawing valid inferences from data.

Standardized Rubrics

Faculty teaching a General Education course are asked to identify one General Education Assignment (GEA) which should target the general education SLOs. The faculty member must assess the GEAs using the standardized Canvas Outcomes appropriate for their course. 

For detailed instructions on how to import the general education learning outcomes into your courses, please see the Faculty Reources page of this website.

Basic Assessment Process

Faculty assessment in Â鶹ÃÛÌÒAV's General Education courses will happen every semester. Each faculty member will have students submit a General Education Assignment (GEA) to Canvas. The faculty will then score the GEA for a random 10% of their students using the Canvas Outcomes appropriate for their course. At the end of the semester, the GEAs and Canvas Outcomes will be automatically pulled from Canvas and stored (de-identified) in a general education database. As a means of conducting interrater reliability, a random 10% sample from across the university will be collected and sent to departmental faculty groups for rescoring. All of the assessment data will be presented in the general education data dashboard and accessible year-round. However, the General Education Council will only review the data collectively on a yearly basis and make curricular tweaks as they see fit to make sure students are achieving desired learning outcomes.