The General Education Committee took up on 24 February your department’s response to a request for more detail on its assessment efforts. The GEC is grateful for your prompt and complete cooperation.
With regret, the GEC has to inform the Department of Music that in its judgment the current assessment strategy is unable to provide useful information on the degree to which students, in developing a life-long appreciation of the arts and humanities, demonstrate “an ability torecognize works of literature or fine art and place them in their historical, cultural, and social contexts.”
The GEC wants to emphasize that the outcome to be assessed has two related components (1) recognizing works and (2) placing the recognized works intheir historical, cultural, and social contexts. The GEC does not expect that students will be able to know by an audio clip that a particular work is by such and such a composer, let alone its opus number or key. On the other hand, an assessment of learning in a music course would seem to require some prompt on the basis of which students can be expected to demonstrate recognition that the exemplar is a piece with particular characteristics (period or national/regional origin or form or function). With respect to the second (contextualizing) component, the assessment must have means of testing whether students understand that this piece with its particular characteristics is representative (or perhaps unrepresentative) of the circumstances of its creation and why or what it is that makes it so.
The GEC has decided that the Department of Music must develop a wholly new assessment program for MUS 2503. (We note the department’sstatement on 21 January 2015 that, “We have this semesteraligned our assessment instrument with the university SLO and will be using the EACVisual Data and Outcomes to assist us in our reviews,” but we are not at all clear what this entails or the degree to which this on-going action will address the concerns we have.) Without presuming to tell the faculty how to do what it undoubtedly knows best, we will make a few points that may make the job easier:
- A good assessment of student proficiency need not be administered at the final (though obviously it should come relatively close to the end of the course)
- Good measures of student proficiency can be achieved through formats other than multiple choice or such so-called “objective” questions
Whatever procedure the faculty develops, it must be one which provides information on the chosen outcome with its two related components and one which constitutes a rigorous test of student proficiency.
Please provide to the GEC a new assessment program—one that addresses the issues identified here and one that the department is prepared to begin implementing in fall 2015—by 28 August 2015. The plan should elaborate the content of the assessment instrument, how it will be administered, the kind or form of data that will be generated, and how those data will be analyzed to serve as a foundation for faculty efforts to make the course achieve the goal of the arts and humanities. As you proceed, please make use of various resources of the university and feel free to contact members of the Committee for their help.