SBC Assessment

Following several years of faculty-led planning, Stony Brook undergraduate students implemented a new general education curriculum for undergraduate students called The Stony Brook Curriculum (SBC) in fall 2014. In fall 2017, the faculty and administration launched a pilot project to study the effectiveness of the SBC, coordinated to coincide with the graduation of the SBC’s first four-year cohort in Spring 2018. This report presents an analysis of evidence this project gathered regarding undergraduate student performance on the SBC learning objectives and learning outcomes. 

The intent of this pilot project is to establish baseline evidence for future projects, and as such, this report does not include historical evidence from similar studies. This project, as detailed in the assessment plan, is the first of its kind at Stony Brook University to aggregate measurements of multiple faculty-defined general education learning objectives across departments, colleges, and schools.

 A collection of committees and faculty working groups, comprising 24 faculty and 8 administrators, established the evaluation tools and methods of local measurements of the SBC. See appendix for a list of the faculty and staff participants in the project. These groups selected to evaluate a total of 91 course sections among spring 2018 offerings based on a set of faculty-defined criteria see appendix for methodology and course selection criteria. The 91 sections represent all departments, programs, colleges and schools that offer undergraduate classes.  A minimum of 87 faculty taught the 91 sections. The faculty committees developed 15 unique SBC Evaluation Rubrics to evaluate students, and based on these rubrics, we received evaluations of students from 86 of the 91 sections, or from 83 of the 87 faculty. The faculty collectively sampled 9,220 student evaluations, comprising 7204 unique students (some students were in more than one of the 86 sections), and resulting in over 27,000 rows of data.

 Local measures in this project included direct evaluations by 83 faculty among 86 class sections, as well as indirect measures from course evaluations conducted in fall 2017 and spring 2018, local surveys of students, faculty and staff as well as information from the SUNY Student Opinion Survey.

 For further information, see the full report in PDF format, a description of our methodology, and a data visualization dashboard in Tableau of the various analyses for this project.

 We plan to conduct this assessment project again in the 2020-21 academic year.