Changing the Narrative Around General Education and Assessment

Office of General Education:

During your keynote speech at the Summer Institute, you made the point that these are difficult times for our students and the culture at large, whether we're talking about mass shootings, racial injustice, or climate change. Do you see a connection between general education and addressing those issues for our students?

Bethany Miller:

People understand the value of learning within their major. If I'm going to be an economist, I expect that I’ll have to take classes like econometrics. But people don't often see how general education connects, how they’re going to use it, and how it adds value to their regular life.

General education creates learning outcomes that a major is not designed to do. When people think about their major, they think about their individual work and their future earning potential. What can I do with this degree? How is this going to help me live a better life?

But I think general education, especially as a shared experience, really has the opportunity to bring us all back together and help us think about big problems in a way you can’t if you're focused exclusively on your major.

OGE:

One of the takeaways from your talk is the value you see general education having for our democracy by sending informed citizens out into the world. That said, you made the point that we don’t always do a good job explaining that to people.

Miller:

I think we're seeing it play out in society now. There’s this idea that higher education is a bastion of liberalism where everyone holds the same ideas and we’re indoctrinating students in a very particular way. When people say that, it tells me they haven’t spent much time on a college campus or ever attended a faculty meeting where it’s virtually impossible to get everyone to agree on anything.

It's not about teaching people what to think but how to think. It doesn’t matter if you come away from a text with the same ideas as me. We’re reading from two different sets of life experiences and perspectives. What stands out to me may not stand out to you.

If people are only operating in an echo chamber and haven’t learned how to access information and think about it critically, that’s a problem. In that way, general education can help counter that and provide value for the broader community and our democracy.

OGE:

During your talk you made the argument that we need to change the narrative around assessment and see it as a tool for storytelling. Could you explain?

Miller:

People often think of assessment as an external driver, that’s usually connected to accreditation. It’s seen as this bureaucratic thing that must be done and that doesn’t add value, so nobody really wants to do it. That's why I said I don't ever use the “A” words (assessment and accreditation) together.

But if we reframe assessment as telling us if we’re meeting our educational intentions, then it becomes a different conversation. When I talk about assessment, I frame it as an opportunity for continuous improvement.

When I meet with faculty, I don’t tell them what to do or how to invest their time. I just ask questions like: What are the three things you wish you knew about your students?

The key is providing faculty and staff with the tools to be able to do their work well and build assessment into what they already are doing. I think assessment should be manageable and it should be baked into what faculty are already doing.

Ultimately, we need to understand if we're meeting the promises that we make to our students and their families when they choose to spend their time, talent, and dollars with us. And assessment can help us provide an answer.

Bethany Miller, PhD, is the Director of Institutional Research and Assessment at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. In May, she was the keynote speaker at the 2022 Summer Institute, a professional development event hosted by First-Year Experiences, Pathways General Education, and Inclusive Excellence. The two days of sessions were attended by more than 180 of Virginia Tech’s faculty and staff.