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From Jose Bowen's blog: course evaluations tend to focus on the perception of teaching. What if, instead, we focused them on institutional and departmental (and, I'd add, instructor and course) goals for learning?

An interesting approach to the way an institution's design affects the kind of education it delivers. Considering Kenyon's ongoing consideration of general education requirements, I'll exerpt here the last paragraph as a prompt for discussion: "General education is often thought of as a means to expose students to a broad range of "essential" knowledge and to provide a historical context for the culture in which they live. These are valid, but insufficient, goals. The purpose of general education should be to produce graduates who are skilled in communication, imbued with quantitative reasoning skills, instinctively collaborative, inherently transdisciplinary in their approach to problems, and engaged in their local and global communities-broadly educated individuals with an informed perspective on the problems of the 21st century and the integrative abilities to solve them."

"Assessing assessment" seems painfully meta, but we spend enough energy on our departmental reviews that we should ensure the process is useful. This article asks 14 questions in order to help guide thinking about whether an assessment plan is currently successful. The questions asked focus more on the students' learning outcomes rather than indirect measures of institutional efficiency.

"Assessing assessment" seems painfully meta, but we spend enough energy on our departmental reviews that we should ensure the process is useful. This article asks 14 questions in order to help guide thinking about whether an assessment plan is currently successful. The questions asked focus more on the students' learning outcomes rather than indirect measures of institutional efficiency.

"In my view, the way to defend the value of college is to defend the importance of intellectual virtues and then show that the education that colleges provide is successful at cultivating those virtues." Swarthmore psychologist Barry Schwartz gives an interesting list of the habits of mind which are the components of "critical thinking."

Jose Bowen, president of Goucher College and author of the book _Teaching Naked_, is starting a 5-part series on liberal arts education as the "degree of the future". In part one, I'd note the implied difference between "critical" and "creative" thinking.