International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
Volume 3, Number 1, January 2009

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Research Article

Excerpt

Assessing Student Learning and Perceptions in an Upper-level General Education Requirement Argumentation Course

This project addressed the difficulties of teaching argument skills, a staple of liberal education, to a mixture of Communication majors and non-majors taking the course for General Education Requirement (GER) credit. The design uses independent instructor comparison of students’ pre- and post-test performances, students’ comparative self-evaluation of their pre- and post-test performances, as well as students’ reflections on their learning in response to a separate questionnaire and independent instructor assessment of their performance in arguing those reflective claims, to analyze learning processes in an upper-level argumentation course. The results include specific content concepts and course and instructor strategies that both majors and non-majors credit for improvements in their argument skills, suggestions for assessing whether GER courses meet their learning outcome goals, and analysis of the importance of attending to students’ own perceptions of and justifications for changes (or lack thereof) in their performances on tasks tied to liberal learning outcomes..

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Bio

Kathryn Olson
University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA
kolson@uwm.edu

I am a Professor of Communication and Director of the Rhetorical Leadership Graduate Certificate/Concentration Program at University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. Previously I was on the faculties of University of Wisconsin - Madison and University of Alabama – Huntsville. My research and teaching interests are in rhetoric and argumentation, and current projects include a book on rhetorical invention and an essay on experiential argument. My Ph.D. is from Northwestern University, my M.A. is from University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, and my B.A. is from University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire. My awards include a 2006 UW System Regents Teaching Excellence Award and two National Communication Association Golden Anniversary Monograph Awards. A UWM Center for Professional and Instructional Development research fellowship supported this project.

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International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning is a publication of the Center for Excellence in Teaching at Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, Georgia, USA.