April 15, 2011
| Members Present | Ex-Officio Present | Guests Present |
| Heather Bush | Bill Rayens | |
| Jane Jensen | Mike Shanks | |
| Derek Lane | Debra Sharp | |
| Roxanne Mountford | Leah Simpson | |
| Karen Petrone | ||
| David Royster | ||
| Ben Withers | ||
| Ernie Yanarella |
1. The Minutes from April 01, 2011 were approved
2. Information items
a) Rayens reported that Associate Provost Mike Mullen agreed to fund a wine and cheese meeting for IGEOC that would focus on discussing the approval and review process.
b) Rayens reported that he has been scheduled to talk with the Senate Council on April 25 (3 pm, 103 Main). Topic will be the suggested policy language that IGEOC has created.
c) Rayens also reported that Sheila Brothers had advised him that courses approved late in the spring semester may still qualify for provisional approval by the Senate Council Chair.
3. Discussion and Vote: Rubrics for CCII and “Citizenship.” Subcommittees formed by IGEOC and charged with developing assessment rubrics for CCII and (a single rubric) for U.S. Citizenship and Global Dynamics have submitted their drafts and both drafts were circulated prior to the meeting. The drafts were opened up for discussion. Leah Simpson noted that she was not too worried about the time line if the rubrics are sent back to the working committees. Only constraint is the need to get this done before faculty on the committees leave for the semester.
a) CCII – Summary of discussion
- Some issue with getting to the artifacts for oral part. Some digital artifacts will have some oral components and this makes it a little harder to use the rubric.
- Suggestion of making the rubric a 0 to 4 scale instead of 1 to 5. Use 2 as “minimal compliance.”
- Suggestion to make the visual part more symmetric with the others. E.g. lacks “intelligible” category.
- Discussion on who decides this rubric scale, but agreed that it was IGEOC that had this authority.
- Request to have final product circulated by email. Tentative approval pending satisfactory revisions.
b) Citizenship – Summary of discussion
- Modeled heavily after AACU value rubric.
- Change scale to 0 to 4 with 2 meaning minimal competence, just as in CCII.
- Suggestion to make sure all subsequent Gen Ed rubrics follow this 0-4, 2=minimal competence form.
- Comments from Dr. Grabau communicated by email to Rayens were discussed.
Committed asked Rayens to ask Dr. Grabau to contact the rubric committee.
Committee recommended some judicious placement of “and/or” to resolve part of the historical bias that Dr. Grabau was concerned with.
- Tentative approval pending satisfactory revisions.
4. HIS 108, 109, and 112 had been recommended for approval by Dr. Yanarella, but he requested that a discussion take place prior to the vote. At issue was what some felt were pedestrian revisions to HIS 108 and 109. The worry that these courses would drift over time to a place unacceptable to IGEOC was surfaced.
- Dr. Withers asked how do we might use assessment data to find out how courses are handled. He thought GEOC should have the ability to drill down to that level. May not be feasible because department-specific, certainly course-specific numbers of artifacts in the sampling design may be far too small.
- Dr. Yanarella gave some background on how HIS was involved in a first set of revisions that got the courses up to “adequate” for his vetting team. Dr. Petrone, who is incoming History Department Chair, said she would make sure that 108 and 109 would be stay appropriately aligned with the template requirements.
5. After informal discussion concerning summer IGEOC duties the meeting adjourned at 1:00 p.m.
