The Council for Academic Affairs reviewed the final two Undergraduate Learning Goals of Writing and Critical Thinking and discussed forming a committee to take action on university-wide learning goals.

Assistant English professor Tim Taylor and Psychology professor John Best presented the Undergraduate Learning Goals of Writing and Critical Thinking. the Critical Thinking area of CASL and Taylor represents Writing Across the Curriculum.

Best discussed the “concern of overall level of performance” in Critical Thinking in the CASL assessment.

He said that students’ abilities aren’t meeting with CASL’s expectations in the learning goals.

Best said that students have what he calls “domain-specific knowledge,” in which students can use critical thinking well in their area of study, but are lacking in other areas outside their domain.

Students should focus on deductive reasoning, strong arguments and supporting a hypothesis, Best said.

Taylor talked to the CAA about the Writing Undergraduate Learning Goal. He presented data from the Electronic Writing Portfolio from fall 2010 to summer 2011 and discussed what can be improved in the future.

EWP readers made suggestions to help improve future student writing at Eastern.

“The papers are adequate, but they’re not inspired or passionate,” Taylor said.

He said students need to be more exposed to good models of writing and work more with the revision process.

“There’s still a lot of regurgitation of information,” he said.

Taylor said that seniors should be more knowledgeable about topics and not just reproduce the information they learned without being able to analyze it.

The other big topic discussed at the meeting was a proposal from History Professor Debra Reid, about CAA action on university-wide learning goals.

Reid sent out a proposal to the other CAA members about improving student learning and outcomes of the four Undergraduate Learning Goals: Writing, Critical Thinking, Global Citizenship and Speaking.

The CAA then discussed further action on the proposal and moved to form a committee to come up with a formalization of the proposal and outline what the next steps for the CAA would be. This committee includes Reid, Rebecca Throneburg, professor of communication disorders, and Aseret Gonzalez, a senior sociology major.

The CAA concluded that having members from CASL in the committee would be beneficial for information and expertise.

“We all have a role to play,” Reid said.

The three-person committee plans to have this formalization in writing at the next meeting.

Other topics discussed by the CAA include items added to the agenda. Among these are revisions of the Latin American Studies Minor, revisions to the English major and a new course, English Major Forum.

Robyn Dexter can be reached at 581-2812 or redexter@eiu.edu.