Honors Assessment — Faculty Orientation

In a minute

You keep teaching your course as you do. You pick the CSLO(s) you're already teaching, tie them to an HIA theme, and design an assessment for your course — an assignment, project, presentation, or panel. The program handles the rest: it derives a disciplinary "lens" from your CSLO, and it runs its own longitudinal instrument that measures integrative learning across the honors experience. Your total lift is about 14 minutes a semester. You never grade the program's instrument.

How your course connects to PSLO 3

Honors PSLO 3 — critically synthesize across disciplines — is the one program outcome no single course teaches. The Honors Common CSLO is the bridge: your section anchors on a CSLO you already teach, and the Common CSLO carries that course-level reasoning up to PSLO 3.

Your course CSLO(s) + HIA theme→ Honors Common CSLO (bridge)→ PSLO 3 · Integrative Learning

Nothing new is added to your course outline — the Common CSLO lives in program documentation, so no curriculum change is required.

What you design — the course-level assessment

In your course, you design the assessment, aligned to your CSLO(s), the HIA theme, and PSLO 3. It can be standalone, or a collaboration with a paired course:

Standalone

One course, one lensAn assignment, project, or presentation in your own course. Develops the disciplinary reasoning your CSLO names — the student thinking from your field's way of knowing.

Collaboration

Two paired courses, two lensesA shared project, assessment, or panel between paired courses. Develops disciplinary reasoning and integrative learning at once — and the shared work is reviewed by each instructor from their own disciplinary perspective.

The collaboration is the interdisciplinary heart. When two courses share a project or panel and each instructor evaluates it through their own lens, students experience integrative learning directly — not as an afterthought. These pairings are also how the program grows: a strong collaboration is the seed of a seminar, a shared course, eventually an honors-prefix course.

What the program runs — the PSLO 3 assessment (not yours)

Separate from your course assessment, the PSLO 3 assessment is the program's own — it isn't tied to any single course. It's a longitudinal, discussion-based instrument run through the Honors Hub that measures and promotes growth in integrative learning across four semesters, scored by the Co-Directors on a five-criterion rubric adapted from the AAC&U Integrative Learning VALUE rubric.

So there are two levels: your course develops the reasoning (and, in collaborations, integrative learning); the program measures integrative growth over time. Because that program measure belongs to no single department, it's the Honors program's assessment.

What you actually do — three light touchpoints

Game Plan→ Form 1

Start of term

Pick your CSLO(s) from the course bank, choose your HIA theme(s), note your assessment (standalone or collab), attach your syllabus. Confirm the consultant identity the system derives.

Adjustment→ Form 3A

After the run

What worked, what didn't, what you'll change next time.

Reflection→ Form 3B

Close of cycle

Did the change work? What changed? What's next?

You do

Teach your course as you already do
Pick your CSLO(s) + theme(s); design your assessment
Confirm your derived consultant identity
In a collaboration, review the shared work through your own lens
Answer three short reflections across the cycle (~14 min total)

You don't

Grade the program's discussion instrument
Change your syllabus or add course outcomes
Build pairings or design the interdisciplinary layer (the system derives it; the Director curates it)
Attend training sessions or build Hub content

Your consultant identity

From the CSLO you pick, the system derives a consultant identity — the professional thinker your course produces (Epidemiologist, Ethicist, Data Analyst, …), with the core questions it asks and the blind spot it can't see on its own. It comes back to you to confirm, edit, or replace — nothing is finalized without your sign-off. That identity is what students inhabit in the program's discussion instrument, and it's what makes cross-disciplinary pairing meaningful.