As part of its commitment to include student views in assessing the effectiveness of general education at Missouri State, we asked students who were enrolled in courses from the Human Cultures and Information Literacy sections of the curriculum if they thought their respective course was effective at teaching its goals and how important the students considered those goals.
Human Cultures
In the Spring ’18 semester, we asked students how well their Human Cultures course had taught them to understand the principles of human behavior and/or social interactions in a variety of settings. This question was developed from General Education Goal 8: Human Cultures. This voluntary survey yielded 414 responses from students in all undergraduate classification levels. See the chart below for a breakdown of their responses.
Information Literacy
During the same time frame as above, we asked students in Information Literacy courses a similar question. How well did the Information Literacy course(s) you took help you learn how to identify, locate, evaluate, and effectively and responsibly use and share information for a particular problem? Again, this question was developed from the general education goal tied to these courses. See a breakdown of the 118 responses below.
Conclusions
What did students think? More than 86% of those reporting had a positive impression of how well they learned the course goals. Did students themselves consider the course goals worthwhile? Slightly more than 80% of students who left a response described the goals as “Important” or “Somewhat Important.” Fewer than 4% selected “Unimportant.”
PROTIP: including “I don’t know/No opinion” as an option can improve the quality of scale data. If a ‘no opinion’ option is not included, many people will instead select the middle response on a scale by default. The result is that they are providing a score or value when they have no intention of doing so.