City College of San Francisco - California Competes

THEME II
learning outcomes for all students passing through this course, then the English Department would have
to initiate a comprehensive revision of its entire writing and reading sequence. Clearly, the courses that
come before and after English 94 were going to have to be revised based on the changes in this crucial
transitional class that connects basic skills with collegiate and transfer-level writing classes.
Therefore, in Fall 2002, the English Department launched a comprehensive effort to revise all of the
courses in the reading and composition sequence. There are eight reading and writing courses below
English 1A. 9 For several of these courses, between 30 and 40 sections are offered each semester. Even for a
very large department, this is a daunting task, and everyone involved recognized from the outset that this
would take a number of years to complete. Based on the lessons learned from the common exam pilot
projects, the English Department Curriculum Committee charged each of the “level workgroups” with
developing specific maps of students’ entry characteristics and realistic delineations of learning outcomes
that could be effectively accomplished and accurately measured. While there was common agreement
that English 94 required immediate attention, one of the challenges the Department faced was the “ripple
effect” that one set of outcomes would have on the courses above and below the target class. At the same
time, there was reasonable apprehension among some faculty that this effort to match the skills taught to
the capabilities of the students at each level might result in a “dumbing down” of the sequence, creating
a gap between the pre-collegiate coursework and the transfer-level classes.
The Department was mindful of a lesson of the Carnegie retreat: “You start with the test, and work
backwards to what goes on in the classroom.” That is, the process of trying to carefully define the outcomes
and conceptualize the assessment of those outcomes while simultaneously developing the revised
course outlines provides an interactive dialog that results in improvements in the teaching and learning
process. The leaders of these initiatives quickly realized that assessment was going to play a significant
long-term role in both the development of these course revisions and the active, ongoing maintenance
of the effectiveness of the course sequence. However, there still was not broad-based support in the
Department for adopting common assessments across the curriculum. That would take time and evidence
that the common assessments would produce something other than a short-term tool for standardizing
outcomes expectations. The members of the department most committed to common assessments also
recognized that assessment would have to be embraced by the faculty working on the courses, not
imposed from the outside by advocates of SLOs.
At the time of this essay, Spring 2005, the English Department is just a little over two years into this
revision process. English 94 has been revised into a new course, English 93, with much more precisely
defined learning outcomes and with a periodic broad-based common assessment of those outcomes
written into the course outline of record. The discussion of incorporating a learning assessment mechanism
into all of the Department’s sequential courses has “come out of the closet” and is an active part
of the discussions at every level of the course revision process.
There are currently two additional pilot projects in the English Department using common assessments
as a tool for evaluating instructional effectiveness. The first involves the lowest level composition course,
English 90. Over the last two years, many of the English basic skills faculty have been involved in a project
funded in part by the Koret Foundation designed to integrate the teaching of reading with writing by
developing a learning community model that involves students registering for team-taught sections of
English 90 and its companion reading course, English 9. This project is based on institutional research
that demonstrated that students who had taken both classes concurrently were more likely to succeed
in subsequent English courses.
9 Four are sequential composition classes; two are developmental reading courses that some students must complete prior
to entering the lowest level writing class; two are independent reading classes that students may elect to take based on
placement results.
268 CITY COLLEGE OF SAN FRANCISCO