'Greater Expectations': Teaching and Assessing for Academic Skills and Knowledge in the General Education History Classroom

"Greater Expectations": A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College", a recently published national report by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, calls for a radical restructuring of liberal arts education in American colleges and universities. Rather than defining liberal arts education in terms of course content and credit hours, the report suggests that students in the twenty-first century need institutions of higher education to develop their practical and intellectual skills, dispositions, ethical and civic responsibility, as well as their knowledge of the disciplines taught in their general education and major courses. The report specifies a set of twenty national practical liberal arts outcomes that create "intentional learners" who are empowered, informed, responsible, and able to apply their knowledge and skills to a variety of real world environments. This report represents just one recent example of a national movement toward outcome-based education. Whether teachers like it or not, outcome (or standards-based) education has become the norm in the United States education system. From kindergarten through college and beyond into professional and graduate programs, teachers at all levels are expected to teach toward defined outcomes that combine knowledge and transferable academic skills, specifying both what students need to learn and what they should be able to do with what they learn. National disciplinary standards, state academic standards, national educational panels, professional accrediting bodies, academic institutions, as well as academic departments, all define these outcomes. This author stresses that teaching academic skills in a general education history course ensures that students will learn to analyze sources and write historical interpretations, in order to learn both the historical content and to develop higher-order thinking skills. He illustrates this process with a discussion of his analysis and assessmentof students in a "History of the United States in the 1960s" course. (Contains 12 notes.)