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  • Editor's Note
  • Claire Major

Welcome to the Journal of General Education, Volume 55, Issue 2! This issue presents three articles and a book review, each of which is related to assessing outcomes in general education. These research-based works provide information that can inform practice, helping us as we make decisions about curriculum, instruction, and other experiences that are important to student learning and development.

Diane Gillespie, Sally Rosamond, and Elizabeth Thomas in "Grouped Out? Undergraduates' Default Strategies for Participating in Multiple Small Groups" use a qualitative approach to present the student perspective of what goes on in small group settings. They describe how these perspectives change the learning environment. In particular, they consider the ways in which students filter information and how these ways can present challenges to the learning environment.

Two articles in this issue address how the introduction of an assessment instrument can alter student success. In "Assessing and Improving the Quality of Group Critical Thinking Exhibited in the Final Projects of Collaborative Learning Groups," Jon F. Schamber and Sandra L. Mahoney look at writing as an assessment of critical thinking. They find that the use of rubrics can improve critical thinking. In "Higher Placement Standards Increase Course Success but Reduce Program Completions," Eric Jacobson tells us how an assessment measure altered, both positively and negatively, the success of students enrolled in developmental and standard math courses.

In his book review of Pascarella and Terenzini's classic work How College Affects Students: A Third Decade of Research, Nathaniel J. Bray provides an insightful view of the updates to the authors' two previous volumes. Bray notes the improvements the authors have made to this third edition of their classic work, and he considers the contributions and relevance their findings have for the field of higher education. [End Page vii]

I hope you will enjoy this issue and that in reading these important works, you will be inspired to make your own contributions to the Journal of General Education! For guidelines for submitting articles, see those contained in this volume or visit the following URL: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_general_education/information/guidelines.html.

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