Honors Hub · PSLO 3 (Integrative Learning) · for the Advisory Committee
What’s settled, what’s open, and what the pilot will test
A candid map of the assessment design — the questions already worked through, and the one the pilot exists to answer. Nothing here is adopted; this is a proposal for the committee’s judgment.
The method assesses integrative learning where it can actually be observed: not inside one student’s essay, but in the space between two students holding different disciplinary lenses on a shared question. That’s a real theoretical bet — that integration is dialogic, lived between perspectives rather than within one. This page is the honest accounting of where that bet is solid and where it still needs evidence. It’s written this way on purpose: a committee should be able to see the seams.
Questions the design already answers
Settled by design
Does a dialogic method still credit the individual student?
Yes, and the rubric separates the two on purpose. C1 (Fidelity to disciplinary method) and C2 (Evidence Integration) score the individual’s disciplinary work and travel with that student regardless of their partner. C3 (Discipline Limits / blind-spot awareness) and C4 (Engagement with Other Fields) are the program-level, cross-disciplinary dimensions that emerge from the pairing. Integrative Learning is measured in C3/C4; individual competence is protected in C1/C2.
Weighting: Role Fidelity 35% · Evidence Integration 25% · Peer Engagement 15% · Integration Across Roles 25%; Blind-Spot Awareness is an unweighted gate, not a scored slice — a student must show it, but it doesn’t inflate the composite.
Settled by design
Who decides the disciplinary lenses, and on what principle?
The lens (“identity”) is derived from the course’s CSLO, not from the course title or the department. The Epidemiologist comes from BIO 121’s “apply the scientific method”; the Ethicist from PHIL 107’s “analyze ethical dilemmas using multiple moral frameworks”; the Logical Analyst from PHIL 105’s “construct and evaluate arguments.” Each carries a stated evidence signature and an explicit blind spot, and the design rule requires each blind spot to be genuinely distinct from the others.
Pairings are chosen for a named epistemic tension — Argument ↔ Context, Principle ↔ Story — so the between-space has something real to integrate, not two lenses that already agree.
Settled by design
Does it connect to the existing compliance architecture, or is it a parallel system?
It maps to the standard forms rather than replacing them: the Game Plan feeds the evidence signature, which feeds Form 1 (assessment method), which aggregates into Form 2 (course- and program-level outcomes by criterion), which feeds Form 3A/3B and the longitudinal PSLO 3 record. The forms fill from the same data, no separate entry.
The open question the pilot exists to test
Genuinely open
Partner-dependence in the cross-disciplinary criteria
Because C3 and C4 emerge from the pairing, a student’s score on those two dimensions depends partly on the partner they were paired with. A strong student paired with a disengaged one may show less integration through no fault of their own. C1/C2 protect the individual’s disciplinary score, so the exposure is bounded to the two integrative criteria — but it is real, and it is the thing a validation study has to check.
This is the honest limit of any dialogic instrument: you gain observability of integration by making it interpersonal, and you inherit interpersonal dependence as the cost. The design contains it (individual criteria are insulated); the pilot has to measure whether it distorts the integrative criteria enough to matter.
What a pilot would establish
- Inter-rater reliability on C1–C4 — do two faculty readers score the same discussion alike? (The same double-scored-calibration method already used in the Physical Sciences DSLO cycle.)
- Partner-effect size — how much of a student’s C3/C4 variance is attributable to their partner vs. themselves, and is it large enough to warrant a scoring adjustment or a re-pairing rule.
- Construct alignment — do C3/C4 scores correlate with independent judgments of integrative thinking, i.e. is the between-space measuring what we claim.
- Developmental fit — the cohort is developmental; a pilot builds the population forward rather than requiring students who have already finished, so the first run is the baseline, not a verdict.