Report on Pilot Project Implementing New Texas General Education Requirements in Physics Course

The new general education requirements will require faculty to assess our courses and will be potentially time consuming. I piloted this assessment regimen in an introduction to physics class and report the results. While the results are preliminary they were encouraging. A survey instrument was used to assess teamwork which I will discuss. The instrument to assess other outcomes will also be discussed. Reporting is time consuming and reporting aggregate statistics, in contrast to individual student records, will save a great deal of faculty time -- between a factor of 6 to 15 or more reduction. Analysis of this time savings will be presented. Also to be presented is why the ``shotgun'' reporting and analysis of individual student records is likely to be ineffective due to confounding with several other factors. In other words, it's a bad experiment design. In conclusion I will present two examples of better experiments to acquire the information desired -- a study using aggregate data and a study focused on a subset of the student population.