Proposal to Assess Humanities Appreciation Courses at Longview
I.
Humanities Assessment—Longview Project (HALP). Anne Dvorak and Jim
Smith, co-coordinators.
II.
Narrative overview of assessment project
This project, modeled after the MCC GenCat tool for assessing written
communication, is designed to benchmark competent analysis and evaluation of the arts in
arts appreciation classes at Longview. Faculty who agree to participate in this project would
donate their final exam period for a prompt that would ask students to explain the
aesthetic standards they would use on a work and to apply those standards accordingly.
(Faculty could modify this prompt to suit their needs, so long as the intent of the prompt is
unchanged.) Faculty who volunteered to score the samples would be normed to a holistic
rubric and then asked to score student responses. Students would eventually receive their
scores through the Office of Research and Assessment as a measure of their performance
outside of the classroom context.
This project addresses the cognitive skills of identification, analysis, and evaluation
necessary for articulating an aesthetic response to works in the humanities. It is linked
specifically to the humanities competencies wherein students will
• Identify aesthetic standards used to make critical judgments.
• Articulate a response to participation in, or observance of, works in the arts
and humanities based upon aesthetic standards.
We will need to evaluate a number of issues to determine the effectiveness of this
assessment project: The Office of Research and Assessment can provide us with
quantitative measures on inter-rater reliability and a target quota for a representative
sample. Questions of validity may need to be assessed more qualitatively: one variable that
will need careful thought is the degree to which writing skills will interact with the ability
to make critical aesthetic judgments. We will need a debriefing of faculty who participate
in the norming and scoring to elicit their perceptions of the validity of this tool. A final
measure of effectiveness of this tool will come from the dissemination of these results: will
faculty understand what they mean and address them in their pedagogy? We will need to
discuss the results in division meetings and create a response form to the assessment to
help faculty process the data and plan interventions.
Probably the first thing we want to know in creating this assessment project is
whether it can be done—whether one prompt and one rubric will capture all the ways in
which aesthetic judgments are derived in all of the arts. If we decide in our debriefings
that the measure “works,” then we will want to know if most Longview students are
capable of “competent” aesthetic judgments at the end of 16 weeks, based on the
limitations of a timed sample of their work. We may be able to determine if some
disciplines struggle more toward this outcome than others, and may discover crossdisciplinary means of improving students’ scores.
III. Literature Review
The humanities is one of the last general education outcomes to be assessed, for
two reasons. Humanities faculty have often been utilized for conducting other assessment
projects, especially in communication and in critical thinking, so the human resources have
not been available. Secondly, the literature has been silent regarding other humanities
measures in academia, so we have had no models for guidance. In the last six months or
so, however, a few projects have been brought to public notice. Parkland College collected
essays from their Literature classes and scored them on a four-point scale on such criteria as
“a) ability to analyze and interpret, b) ability to make clear connections between ideas, c)
ability to support a stance with textual evidence, d) ability to recognize and acknowledge
variant readings and/or ambiguities in meaning, e) ability to write clearly, with appropriate
terminology.” A second study, in College Teaching (2000), describes an assessment project
for music listening classes that used a three point rubric to discern if students “1. listen
actively to the music, 2. describe the music, in both plain English and musical language,
and discuss it in terms of style; 3. make connections between the music and its social and
historical context, 4. write coherently about music.” A third project, a portfolio including
an “aesthetic analysis,” asks students to choose an analysis they have written for one of the
visual or performing arts. Students are instructed to “demonstrate [their] ability to analyze
the work’s form, structure, and contexts; ultimately, it should interpret the work in some
way.” Students are also asked to “describe the analytical thinking involved in the entry. . . .
[to provide a]judgment about the quality and the ‘representativeness’ of [their] use of
analysis and/or evaluation.”
These examples demonstrate a number of factors we will need to consider: most of
these assessments only address one discipline; some blend writing skills with appreciation
skills in their assessment; and they use a variety of measures, from tests to essays to
portfolios. The last approach hints that we may be able to work interdisciplinarily. The
approaches we have found seem to mirror the GenCat method of creating a rubric that is
scored holistically, though.
IV. Project details
A. Faculty will volunteer classes from art history, music appreciation, literature,
humanities, and philosophy. We currently have 12 sections of arts courses volunteered
for the pilot next semester, and estimate roughly 300 potential students.
B. Students will be given a standard prompt either at the end of the semester or as part of
their final exam that elicits a 40 minute timed writing that will identify their aesthetic
criteria for evaluating a work in the art field under study. This writing will be collected
after the end of the semester; identifying marks will be erased, and faculty will be
trained to assess each piece based on a holistic scoring rubric to be designed.
C. Faculty involved in the project to date: Anne Dvorak and Jim Smith, as co-chairs of the
Humanities Assessment Committee; Kurt Canow, Kathy Kiser, Cathy Hardy, and
JoAnn Gloor, as members of same. Jane Aspinwall and Pat Sparks have offered their
classes for this project.
D. This project has been discussed with the Longview Assessment Committee and with
Diana Grahn, chair of the DSCIA.
V. Implementation Process (Identify the following):
A. Anne Dvorak and Jim Smith are co-coordinators of this project; for other participants,
please see IV. C.
B. The coordinators of this project are responsible
• for coordinating the committee to develop the prompt and rubric for scoring;
• for developing the literature necessary to elicit participation from faculty and
students;
• for directing the norming and evaluating sessions; for creating materials
explaining the scores to students who will receive this information the following
semester;
• and for assessing the success of the project.
Other participants will be compensated for the norming and scoring sessions at an
hourly rate of $25/hour.
C. Timeline:
• Develop measure and rubric by February 2004
• Administer pilot—May 2004
• Norming and scoring sessions—June 2004
• Internalizing of data and assessment of project—August 2004
• If feasible, project will be continued with another data collection in December
2004, etc.
Budget:
Pay units for the start-up of the project:
$ 2,100
(1.5 units for each coordinator—3 pay units total--@$700/unit)
Stipends for norming and assessment sessions
$1,500
(600 readings/12 readings per hour, at $25 an hour,
including a one-hour norming beforehand)
Meetings and training expenses
$ 300
Clerical expenses
$ 150
Copying expenses
Total
$ 200
$4,250
Signatures/date of faculty proposal applicants:
(The undersigned have read and agree to comply with MCC’s Statement of Ethical Conduct and
Assessment listed in the RFP invitation)
Coordinator or Co-coordinators:
Other Project Participants:
Signature/s of Division Chair/s of Faculty Applicants:
Administrative Signatures/date:
Instructional, Occupational and/or Student Services Dean/s:
Campus President/s: