11:15 – 12:00 Assessing Critical Thinking through Writing: a University-wide Initiative

Marti Singer, Georgia State University's Rhetoric and Composition Program

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Nick's Raw Notes From Marti Singer's Presentation

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Key URLs from Marti's talk:
Critical Thinking Through Writing: http://www.gsu.edu/ctw/

Marti currently chairs the SACs accreditation committee.

Leading up to that, she was part of a committee that worked on establishing university wide learning outcomes (LOs). In 2003 that committee came up w/ the following LOs:

Written communication; critical thinking; collaboration; contemporary issues; quantitative skills; technology; and then added an oral communication.

People on campus were aware of these new outcomes, but not always involved. Thus the LOs were on paper, but not yet in the curriculum, as was learned from 2005 reports on LO implementation university wide.

In 2006, university bought into Weave Online – an outcomes based software program that helps you analyze progress on outcomes.

Fall 2006 Marti asked to be chair of UW assessment committee to analyze Weave results.

Assoc. Provost for Institutional Effectiveness – had them look at one thing for SACs and they decided everyone cares about thinking and writing so that was focus. WAC helped and they developed Critical Thinking Through Writing initiative: http://www.gsu.edu/ctw/

Using U. Sentate committees to help get faculty buy in. Made a motion to require every student at G. state to take two courses that offer CTTW.

Have u-wide assessment committee (big committee, 15 people) who approve the CTTW course for each major.

Next step was group called coordinators who offer workshops to teach and help faculty create assisgnments that meet CTTW: What is critical thinking in . Hard to do.
Then when you add the writing piece, it's even harder.

How do you encourage disciplines to come on board if you say their writing has to look like mine?

As of today, all of the ambassadors (46) are to put forth and share the draft of their initiative plan and courses they are going to use to meet the CTTW goal.

Look at drafts and do follow up workshops in November.

Have to define critical thinking
Have to describe why they chose the courses they did.