Interview with director of AAC&U's VALUE project

Some quotes from Terrel Rhodes:

...the VALUE Project (Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education) works to develop approaches to assessment based upon examples of student work completed in their courses and saved over time in an e-portfolio. The project collects and synthesizes best practices in assessing student work using rubrics developed by faculty members. One of the project’s core purposes is to identify commonalities of outcome expectations of achievement across a variety of institutions.

It is ironic that just at the point when higher education research has finally developed a rich information base on effective practices that enhance learning, on cognitive development and neurobiologic bases of knowing, and technological advances that greatly expand our abilities to collect, preserve and demonstrate complex, multi-faceted learning, that we so willingly accept outmoded, snapshot, shorthand representations of the value of our educational outcomes and impact on student learning.

In contrast, the VALUE project responds to the need for multiple measures of multiple abilities and skills, many of which are not particularly well suited to snapshot standardized tests. The types of learning that employers and policy makers are calling for need to be demonstrated through cumulative, progressive work students perform as they move through their educational pathways to graduation; rich, multifaceted representations of learning in curricular and co-curricular contexts, rather than artificial examinations divorced from applied contexts.

We hope that the VALUE project will be able to demonstrate several things: that faculty across the country share fundamental expectations about student learning on all of the Essential Learning Outcomes deemed critical for student success in the 21st century; that rubrics can articulate these shared expectations; that the shared rubrics can be used and modified locally to reflect campus culture within this national conversation; and that the actual work of students should be the basis for assessing student learning and can more appropriately represent an institution’s learning results.

Our experience at AAC&U in working with faculty on campuses across the country is that faculty are typically eager to have permission to talk about and to focus on student learning. Once you get beyond complaints about teaching is not rewarded adequately, etc., faculty embrace discussing learning and teaching. So, there is no difficulty in getting faculty interested in talking about the subject. The biggest barrier is often a lack of awareness about options for assessing learning and what it would take for the individual faculty member to adapt what they know and are familiar with to some new environment or process.

Increasingly, the investment in e-portfolios is becoming less and less of an obstacle for campuses since there are free Web tools that students can use to construct e-portfolios.

Having been a faculty member on several campuses for over twenty years, I know that using rubrics and e-portfolios does not have to create more work--it requires working differently, shifting my time and focus a bit--but it is richer and more rewarding than what I used to struggle with in trying to communicate my expectations for learning and how students could more readily succeed in meeting those expectations. There is a transparency and communication ability that enriches the conversations both with students and with colleagues.

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