New issue of AAC&U News

The new issue of AAC&U News, is now available.

Assessment of learning is more complicated than it is (?)

More reporting by Inside Higher Ed from last week's meetings of AAC&U and CHEA. Selected quotes:

Despite the uptick in activity, "I still feel like there's no there there" when it comes to colleges' efforts to measure student learning, Kevin Carey, policy director at Education Sector, said in a speech at the Council for Higher Education Accreditation meeting Tuesday.

Views like Carey's, which are widely held by policy experts who look at higher education from the outside, tend to aggravate faculty members and other professionals in the industry to no end...given how much assessment activity is unfolding on the campuses.

That's where the disconnect comes in. Most of the assessment activity on campuses can be found in nooks and crannies of the institutions - by individual professors, or in one department - and it is often not tied to goals set broadly at the institutional level. Some of it has been undertaken directly in response to the outside calls for accountability, and seems workmanlike - testing or measurement done for measurement's sake.

To be ultimately successful, any meaningful assessment effort must be embraced widely by instructors...and to do that, "you've got to start this conversation as an instructional conversation that includes assessment".... It must begin with agreement (in a department, a college, and ultimately across a discipline or institution) about the learning goals that students should derive from the curriculum - and then intensive work to infuse the skills needed to reach those goals into the curriculum, course by course....

But that sort of assessment alone doesn't meet what McWalters called the "other part of the test" - the comparability goal on which policy makers insist to hold institutions accountable. "A legitimate process for evaluating learning outcomes," Carey told the CHEA meeting Tuesday, "has to...be consistent, it needs to be understandable to someone other than the institution itself, and...it needs to be judged relative to some kind of standard."

And now, for the rest of the story...

Getting engaged is more complicated than it is (?)

Inside Higher Ed reporting on a session at the recent AAC&U annual meeting. Selected quotes:

The unsurprising fact that students are very different from one another, and the slightly less expected reality that any individual student can be significantly more or less engaged at various points in his or her academic career, suggest the need for a far more nuanced understanding of the "student engagement" theory of learning than has sometimes been the case....

Summing up findings from a research effort that has a primary goal of showing how individualized and ever-changing student "engagement" is predictably challenging, as the researchers were quick to note. But one of their primary (preliminary) recommendations is that precisely because engagement is dynamic rather than static, college officials trying to measure the impact of engagement on student performance should consider changing the unit of measurement from overall grade point average to performance in an academic term, or even a single course.

The study suggests a "complex," and unclear, relationship between engagement and student grades, the researchers say. "Some students need to achieve a certain level of grades before they feel engaged...while for other students, there appeared to be little or no connection between how enmeshed they felt in their work and their grades in those courses.

And now, for the rest of the story...

New issue of Diversity & Democracy

The new issue of AAC&U's publication, Diversity & Democracy, is now available.

Encouraging student participation in large classes

Here are some good ideas from the folks at Faculty Focus.

Data-informed vs. data-driven decision making

This article from Inside Higher Ed describes a project sponsored by Jobs for the Future and the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity and Accountability. The article begins by saying...

"Student success" programs of various types - learning communities, first-year experience programs, and the like - have proliferated on college campuses, driven by the reality that it's easier to keep current students than recruit new ones. The programs are popular, but as is true of just about all campus efforts these days, they are open to scrutiny about their effectiveness -- and their cost effectiveness.

Teagle Foundation's Fall '09 newsletter

Lots of good stuff here.

Q&A with Linda Suskie

Brief, but useful. Click here.

New issue of Bringing Theory to Practice

The December 2009 issue of the newsletter for AAC&U's Bringing Theory to Practice project is now available. Items include:

• Revamping the Teacher-Scholar Model at Washington & Lee University
• BTtoP's Latest Major Push for Transformative and Sustainable Campus Change for Learning: "2010-2012: Focus on Faculty"
• Letter from the Director—The Bringing Theory to Practice Project: Years of Focus on Faculty

New Leadership Alliance for Student Learning and Accountability

From a member of this new organization’s board of directors…

A few years ago I heard the president of one of our finest research universities say, “Great universities measure what they value.”

He was emphasizing a commitment to ambitious goals and rigorous self-discipline, while describing the metrics he planned to use to monitor progress toward the aspirations of his institution to become even greater in national and international stature.

I have no doubt he personally, and also his faculty and administrative leaders, deeply value student learning. But the metrics they employed emphasized research grants, faculty memberships in prestigious societies, citations, publications, etc. The systematic assessment of student learning was not visible in the metrics assembled to monitor progress toward their goals. We tend to take student learning for granted.

Perhaps it is not yet a consensus, but I believe there is a growing conviction within American higher education that all students need to learn more, and more of our students need to achieve high levels of knowledge and skill in order to realize their potential for productive lives in the 21st century. We value student learning. We are likely to expand what students know and can do if we set clear goals and take account of what they are learning.

These views and this conviction are being promulgated by the New Leadership Alliance for Student Learning and Accountability. I have joined the board of this organization, and I invite you to visit its website, www.newleadershipalliance.org, in order to learn more about the movement it hopes to foster.

I hope you will take a moment to review the website. I will be grateful in the coming months and years for your counsel and your participation in these efforts to advance both the depth and breadth of learning among students attending our colleges and universities.

With every good wish,

Paul E. Lingenfelter, President
State Higher Education Executive Officers