CAC conducts assessment of communication-intensive courses across campus in order to facilitate regular reflection on and improvement of our communication curricula. Read more about upcoming assessment cycles below.
Spring 2025 assessment
CAC is conducting assessment on all C-designated courses being offered in Spring 2025. Many of our communication courses and programs have not had a robust assessment of their communication curricula in some time; as such, the goal of this assessment is to draw upon the expertise of our communication faculty to provide all departments with a description of, analysis of, and recommendations for growth in their communication offerings. Our overarching goal is to provide each program with a clear view of where their communication curriculum stands, and where to focus on in the future.
Communication assessment in Spring 2025 will include the following elements:
- Descriptions of the communication assignments offered in C-designated courses in a program, including an analysis of how well common disciplinary genres are represented.
- Descriptions of the communication instruction practices being offered in C-designated courses in a program, including an analysis of how those practices align with modern research in communication pedagogy.
- Descriptions of the types of writing students complete in C-designated courses in a program, based on computational text analysis of samples of student writing. This will be paired with an analysis how well student writing aligns with both assignment tasks and common disciplinary genres.
- Information and analysis of students’ experiences and beliefs about communication instruction, broken down by program.
Individualized departmental reports from CAC will available here in early Fall 2025, and shared by email with individual departments and presented at UGSC.
The core curriculum assessment committee is conducting an additional evaluation of student writing on a subset of 300-400 level courses in the humanities and social sciences, which will follow their standard processes.
Post-2025 assessment
CAC is dedicated to establishing a regular assessment process that operates on a predictable cyclical basis. This process should help us to regularly understand the state of communication instruction at the course, program, and university levels so that we can engage in continuous improvement.
We are still working through the details of this process, pending the upcoming core curriculum changes from the Core Curriculum Task Force. Please check back for more detail as this emerges.