Ramapo College of New Jersey
General Education Curriculum Committee (GECCo)
Meeting Minutes of Wednesday, December 14th, 2011
1:00 – 2:30 P.M.
Room: A-225
Members present: Eric Daffron, Don Fucci, Leigh Cregan Keller, Donovan McFeron, Robert Mentore,
Rick Nunez, Nick Salter, Beba Shamash, Gladys Torres-Baumgarten, Ashwani Vasishth,
Members absent: Monika Giacoppe, Clyde Johnson, Pinar Kayaalp,
The meeting minutes of the 11/9/2011 meeting were approved.
Members of the Quantitative Reasoning Assessment Sub-Committee provided an update on the status
of the final report. A full analysis of the results was delayed because each of the Scantron forms needed
to be counted manually to determine if the achievement target was met. A syllabus audit would follow
soon after the results were finalized.
The Oral Communication Sub-Committee reported that 4 faculty members were selected to score the
oral presentations that were to be assessed. The 4 scorers attended a calibration session on November
28th. The scorers will work in pairs to score the presentations and they would submit a score for each of
the categories on the rubric that was being used for this assessment. They were instructed to consult
with one another to ensure that scores differed by no more than 1 point and that only integers would be
used to score the presentations. The fifty oral presentations would come from 5 different First-Year
Seminar (FYS) courses.
The Information Literacy Assessment Sub-Committee reported that the surveys had been administered
and that the results would be compiled shortly. Two surveys were used with a variety of directassessment and indirect-assessment questions. One survey was sent to students enrolled in FYS and
Critical Reading and Writing II (CRWT 102) courses and the other survey was sent to faculty teaching
those courses. Rather than sample specific courses, sub-committee members decided to ask all FYS and
CRWT II students and faculty to participate in the assessment.
Members of the Critical Inquiry Assessment Sub-Committee reported that they have been considering
several different ways to assess critical thinking: using a rubric on new student samples, using a rubric
on the student writing samples that were collected for the writing assessment performed in Fall 2010, or
using an assessment tool produced by a third party for a fee. They would continue to research their
ideas and report back at the next GECCo general meeting.
The International Perspectives/Intercultural Perspectives Assessment Sub-Committee reported that they
were considering using surveys produced by the American Association of Colleges and Universities
(AAC&U) to assess these two learning outcomes. Some members suggested that some of the questions
on the survey instruments appeared to be more suited for an indirect assessment. Sub-committee
members decided to study the surveys more carefully and report back their findings at the next GECCo
general meeting.
The meeting adjourned at 2:30 P.M.
Respectfully submitted,
Robert Mentore