Assessing Student Outcomes in General Education at Samford University

When we began the Samford Problem-Based Learning (PBL) Ini tiative, we realized that assessment would play an important role. Consequently, we formed an assessment team that consisted of both faculty members and administrators. At the onset of the PBL Initiative, the assessment team met weekly and discussed best practices for evaluating the impact of PBL upon learning at Samford University. The assessment team, in conjunction with external experts, adopted existing measures and developed new assessment measures that we believed would inform us of the quality of experience and effectiveness of PBL on undergraduate and professional education. First, we adopted the critical thinking module from the Colle giate Assessment of Academic Proficiency (CAAP) in order to gauge the reasoning skills among students who were exposed to PBL versus critical thinking skills of students who were not ex posed to PBL. In addition, we developed three assessment tools here at Samford University: (1) The Student Attitudes and Activi ties Assessment (SAAA), (2) The Instructional Landscape Sur vey (ILS), and (3) The End of Course Evaluation (ECE). The SAAA and ECE were designed to determine the effectiveness of PBL at the university, college, and course levels. The ILS was developed to depict the current state of our university's instruc tional landscape; in other words, we wanted to determine the range of instructional activities Samford faculty members use in their classrooms. The SAAA and ECE are examples of indirect assess ment measures that examine perceptions rather than directly ad dress learning. The CAAP critical thinking module is an example