General Education Assessment
Charting a Course
Through a Sea of Diversity
INSTITUTION
RIT is widely recognized as one of
the country’s leading universities, with
highly ranked programs in the liberal
arts as well as technical fields.
With 226 programs and almost a thousand faculty members, the
Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) is a sea of diversity. Students
major in areas that span nine colleges, including such diverse disciplines
as philosophy, biomedical engineering, and furniture design.
CHALLENGE
Over several years, academic programs at
RIT worked to define intentional student
learning outcomes for General Education. But
with a traditional distribution-style General
Education model, ensuring those outcomes
were met wasn’t easy.
“We had approximately 15,000 undergraduate
students,” reported Anne Wahl, RIT’s Director
of Assessment. “No two of them took exactly
the same Gen Ed courses, which made it
very challenging to have comprehensive and
cohesive assessment processes.”
SOLUTION
In January 2009, RIT established an Assessment
Office led by Wahl, who hired an Assessment
Management System Coordinator, Senior
Assessment Associate, and Senior Staff Assistant.
These individuals reach out to faculty and have
become an important part of the solution.
In addition to its suburban Rochester
campus, RIT has international locations
in Eastern Europe and Dubai.
AT A GLANCE
WHAT THEY NEEDED TO DO
• Ensure student learning outcomes
were met across 226 programs
• Support updating of Gen Ed program
To facilitate an enterprise understanding of
the state of assessment at RIT, Wahl held oneon-one talks with the deans of each college
and developed General Education Faculty
Teams to plan the assessment. Additional
faculty assessed outcomes in their courses,
gathered data, and reported their findings. A
General Education mini-retreat brought the
two faculty groups together to further review
the results and talk about how to use the
results and next steps.
In 2010, RIT chose Taskstream to help
manage assessment. As they moved forward,
Wahl found that many of the programs
that were least confident about assessment
actually had the most potential for authentic
performance-based assessment.
SAILING THE SEVEN CS
By 2012, the Assessment Office had identified
• Gain faculty involvement
in assessment
HOW THEY DID IT
• Established Student Learning
Outcomes Assessment Office
• Held one-on-one meetings
and mini-retreat
• Selected Taskstream to
centralize process
WHAT THEY ACCOMPLISHED
• Aligned 19 student learning
outcomes with Gen Ed program
• Brought 22 administrative
units into Taskstream
• Extended assessment to
noninstructional areas such
as Student Support Services
General Education Assessment
Charting a Course
Through a Sea of Diversity
seven adjectives to describe their assessment
strategy so far: Cohesive, Comprehensive, Committed, Clear, Collaborative, Communicated,
and Continuously Focused on Improvement.
Wahl identified several key reasons for
RIT’s successful assessment efforts to
streamline the assessment process and
improve its data analytics.
First, “Be clear about expectations. Communicate early and often!” The Assessment Office
found it important to set benchmarks early, so
that progress could be monitored along the way
and corrections made as needed.
Faculty proved to be engaged and passionate
about student learning. Creating opportunities
for an ongoing conversation was key to gaining
their involvement, and produced helpful ideas.
Institutions, Wahl believes, are well advised to
provide faculty members with structure and
guidance along the way, and appropriate thanks
for their time, expertise, and contribution to
assessing student learning.
“Share your results and how you are going to
use them,” said Wahl. “One of the best things
we did was spend time on the analysis and
discussion on how the data can be used to
guide improvements to teaching and learning.
“We’ve had great success working with
Taskstream,” Wahl continued. “It provides
one place to store, archive, and report our
outcomes assessment data. Taskstream has
been very responsive to our concerns. We’ve
begun a long-term relationship.”
“One of the best things we
did was spend time on the
analysis and discussion on
how the data can be used
to guide improvements to
teaching and learning.”
Anne Wahl
Director of Assessment
Rochester Institute of Technology
Rochester, New York
ABOUT TASKSTREAM
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Our mission is to delight our customers
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Know how. Taskstream.
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