Launched in 2008, the Division of Undergraduate Education’s Departmental Assessment Grant Program now supports a dozen faculty in identifying and assessing student learning outcomes in undergraduate majors. Of these faculty, several are directing projects that have already changed the way their departments think about student learning.
Associate Professor of History Vinayak Chaturvedi joined the program during its first year, proposing to focus on a newly-developed course taken by all upper-division students to improve their writing. Chaturvedi and the History Department’s Undergraduate Program Committee mapped out the technical steps for the task, and gathered a group of History faculty together for discussions to implementing the project.
“It was really helpful to get the input of colleagues in the History Department and others at UCI who have experience with putting together assessment projects in the Humanities. Our project is the result of an on-going collaboration.”
By the end of Fall 2008, the group had developed a grading rubric, used it in assessing student work from the writing course, and analyzed the results of the assessment. An unanticipated result of the exercise was having kicked off a discussion that led to the Department agreeing on a set of learning outcomes for the major as a whole.
Sharon Salinger, Dean of Undergraduate Studies, noted, “What makes Vinayak’s project important is the extent to which he engaged others in the process. By doing so, he helped move the conversation beyond the parameters of a single project to one about student leaning more generally. And that’s the goal of the Assessment Grant Program: To begin with a small project that ends with reflecting on how to change the program and its curriculum in the interest of our students.”
