The University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW) has used five administrations of NSSE and one administration of the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) as indirect and direct measures, respectively, to assess and guide revision of its general education core curriculum, the Basic Studies Program. UNCW is an Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) VALUE (Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education) Partner campus, part of a multi-year, national project to develop rubrics for assessing general education learning outcomes. In 2008, UNCW’s efforts focused on developing 37 common learning outcomes that were used to select departments and courses from which student work would be assessed.
CLA scores were used to assess critical thinking and written communications skills. NSSE results were used to establish trends and to plan for longitudinal disaggregation of data by department and school. Concern over less than desirable results on NSSE items relating to integrating ideas or information from various sources also generated a rubric-based plan for assessing information literacy.
