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, now in its second year, 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 have determined that this project can indeed be done and provide valuable
data. We decided, however, that a forty-minute timed response was inadequate for
providing us with an optimal measure of their ability. In this iteration, we intent instead
to require students to write a short essay incorporating the writing process, allowing for
revision. Faculty who had allowed students a longer timeframe for writing during the
semester found that students seemed to perform at a higher level, so we would like to try
this approach to see if it makes a difference. The GenCat project came to the same
conclusion several years ago.
We plan to continue with the same sample size and demographics as before, and
estimate we will have roughly 275 samples to score at the end of the semester. The
norming session will change, however; we will ask discipline faculty to make presentations
on the material covered in the test questions, so that scorers outside the discipline have a
stronger sense of a “correct” response. In the debriefing from the last session, we
discovered that non-discipline faculty felt at a loss to judge the correct identification and
use of terminology to a specific field. The presentations and handouts should help to
remedy this problem, while allowing us to engage in professional development.
The results from the last session, once determined, will enable us to disseminate
results and discuss them in division meetings, creating a response form to the assessment to
help faculty process the data and plan interventions. The music department is already
planning to use this assessment as part of program review.
The major discovery we have made to date is that the curriculum requirements for
the humanities do not align themselves with the humanities competencies. We cannot
ensure that students gain practice at both the creative arts and the speculative thought
areas before they graduate. We are redressing this matter in a proposal to the Longview
Instructional Committee.
The major dilemma facing us at present is the lack of participation by faculty
representing the “speculative thought” side of the humanities. Faculty representatives from
these areas have been invited to join the committee and participate in future iterations of
the project, but at this moment, they have not responded.
III. Literature Review (from last year’s project):
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 during the semester that allows for
opportunities to revise. 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, Cathy Hardy, and Henri DonnerHendricks, as members of same. Sidney Pener and Terri Lowry have offered their
classes for this project.
D. This project has been discussed with the Longview Assessment Committee, with
Charles Van Middlesworth, 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 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:
• Administer pilot—December 2004
• Norming and scoring sessions—January 2005
• Internalizing of data and assessment of project—March 2005
• Project will be continued with another data collection in May 2005, etc.
Budget per semester:
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 X 2 semesters = $8,500
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: