Hot off the press from AAC&U

Nearly 80% of Colleges Now Have a Broad Set of Learning Outcomes for All Students and more than 70% Now Assess Outcomes Across the Curriculum Beyond The Use of Course Grades

So says AAC&U in a press release issued today.

Click on the link above to read the entire press release. In the meantime, a couple more quotes:

The Association of American Colleges and Universities released findings today from a survey of its members revealing trends in undergraduate education and documenting the widespread use of a variety of approaches to assessing learning outcomes. Completed by chief academic officers at 433 colleges and universities of all sorts (public and private, 2-year and 4-year, large and small), the survey shows that campus leaders are focused both on providing all students a broad set of learning outcomes and assessing students' achievement of these outcomes across the curriculum.

A large majority of institutions surveyed (78%) say that they have a common set of intended learning outcomes for all their undergraduate students. Stated learning outcomes at these institutions include a wide array of cross-cutting skills and areas of knowledge, including many on which earlier surveys suggest employers want colleges to focus. The skills most widely addressed in college and university goals are writing, critical thinking, quantitative reasoning, oral communication, intercultural skills, information literacy, and ethical reasoning. The knowledge areas most often required for all students are humanities, sciences, social sciences, global cultures, and mathematics.

"The findings from this survey indicate an important shift in focus for American higher education away from measuring progress by students' seat time and accumulation of credits toward clarifying more transparently what students are expected to learn," said AAC&U President Carol Geary Schneider. "Colleges and universities increasingly are emphasizing educational practices that help students both achieve essential learning outcomes and also demonstrate their achievement across multiple levels of learning."

As more campuses focus attention on helping students - especially the large numbers of students transferring between and among institutions - integrate the different aspects of their learning and track their progress over time, interest has grown in such practices as capstone projects and e-portfolios.

Nearly all institutions, for instance, now offer capstone projects, with most making them available in departments rather than in general education and the majority offering them as an option rather than a requirement. Nearly 40% require capstone projects of all or most students in departments and 19% require them of all students in general education.

A new model for teaching ethical behavior

Most of us, in our general education programs, have something to say about promoting students' moral/ethical development. According to Robert Sternberg:

College can produce students who are smart and knowledgeable but ethically challenged. By alerting students to the steps in ethical behavior and the potential difficulty of going through them all, students may come to understand why it is so easy to slip into unethical behavior and be more likely to think and behave ethically. Given the problems we face in today's world, that seems like an urgent priority.

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

Lecturing can be engaging too

In the April 20 Inside Higher Ed, Rob Weir says:

In the age of computer-based learning, lecturing gets treated like Model-T Ford. Don’t be deceived; lecturing remains a staple of the academy and it’s likely to remain so for quite some time.

It doesn’t matter how technologically adroit one is or how many non-instructor-directed whistles and bells get crammed into a course, at some point every professor lectures, even if it’s just giving instructions or recapping a completed exercise.

...lecturing is so integral to successful college teaching that it’s a form of masochism and sadism to not become good at it.

The most common reason for bad lecturing isn’t phobia; it’s that professors don’t value the craft enough to hone their skills. Use such individuals as negative role models. Think of the most boring lecturer you’ve ever encountered. Do the opposite!

Bad lecturers violate nearly every rule of good communication.

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

Just for fun. Skip this one if you're in a serious mood.

Approaches to curriculum mapping

Kathleen Morley, University Director of Assessment at Long Island University, posed this question to the ASSESS listserv:

Assessment Colleagues,

One of our programs would like to do curricular mapping, i.e., develop a matrix of how its student learning outcomes align with all of its courses.

I have been asked by a member of the program if it is best practice to develop the matrix for all courses at one time or whether it is acceptable to develop the matrix in segments over time (e.g., ten courses one year and an additional ten courses each following year until all courses are mapped).

On the one hand, developing the matrix at one time will be rather time-consuming. On the other hand, developing the matrix in segments will mean that annual assessment goals will be made before the full picture is developed.

What approach would you recommend? I appreciate your help.

Kathy

Here’s an interesting response from Richard Frye, Office of Institutional Assessment, Research, and Testing at Western Washington University:

Kathy,

Thanks for a fascinating question that we have all wrestled with and which probably has no "correct' answer...!

Our approach here at Western Washington has generally been to encourage an organic process within each program. That often means that not much happens until the program faculty has "wallowed" with the complexity of its own unique goals, objectives, and personalities for awhile before collective insights start to gel. My first take on your faculty member's question is that this is a program faculty that needs more "wallow time," because either approach can be problematical if a few group insights are not established first about the relative importance of various program goals and objectives.

It would be nice to be able to map an entire curriculum at once, but it makes sense for a lot of reasons to help each program come up with its own incremental sequence, starting with a small number of program learning objectives that are considered most important and exploring how they are or are not currently threaded into the curriculum to achieve an overall program goal. Ideally courses themselves are justified by their contribution to the overall learning objectives of the curriculum, and a thorough approach to curriculum mapping is very likely to involve some reallocation of learning objectives across courses as developmental holes or redundancies are discovered and explored.

Curriculum mapping makes most sense to us as an iterative process that can start any number of places, is itself something to be assessed, and which is likely to evolve over time. The "best practices" that seem relevant are "assess what is important" and "assessment must be both practical and useful." As assessment in a program matures, the courses in the program should become increasingly integrated through the mapping of specific levels of specific abilities to specific courses. At the beginning this can be pretty overwhelming. Maybe another "best practice" would be what kids learn at camp; "take all you can eat...eat all you take."

Rich

Can students’ moral development be improved?

In a Chronicle of Higher Education article, Peter Schmidt writes that:

Several studies presented…at the American Educational Research Association's annual conference…suggest that the souls of America's youth will not be saved on its college campuses anytime soon. Although many colleges have committed themselves to promoting the moral and ethical development of their students, they generally have not proven very good at the task, their efforts being undermined by their own cultures and by a failure to adopt effective approaches.

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

Fear of assessment

Here are three contributions to a recent discussion on the POD listserv (link to their archives under “Email discussion groups” on the left side of this page). In the first post, a science faculty member from a Big Ten university poses a question:

Some folks on my campus are concerned that accrediting agencies and other entities may expect us to do "Assessment." (Horror of horrors!) There seems to be some concern that we might be forced to do some sorts of No-College-Student-Left-Behind assessment that may lead to evaluation of (and comparisons among) instructors and that may infringe on principles of academic freedom and tenure. Our faculty council may soon consider a proposed set of "principles of assessment" that apparently is meant, in general, to defend against assessment of student learning.

Are these concerns legitimate? Are there examples of accrediting agencies or other parties calling for assessments that end up harming faculty?

Next is a response from the person who is responsible for assessment at a well-known private university in Texas.

As others have already suggested, there are fears about assessment - and many of these are quite legitimate! [A listserv subscriber] mentions that part of the faculty fear may come from fear of evaluation rather than assessment and I think that this is true.

But a lot of the fear/concern/annoyance/etc. comes because assessment hasn't been presented very well to faculty. I mean, really, faculty evaluate student learning all the time and they do it well. But...then assessment people (and I'm one of those "people") come and essentially say "you aren't doing it well enough and you can't use grades. You have to develop something new and better because what you're doing isn't going to work." Well...that is just silly and the faculty know it. So...assessment becomes a top-down, mandated, accountability-focused, bureaucratic exercise that doesn't do anyone any good except for keep the institution out of trouble (maybe -- many institutions still get dinged for assessment-related issues).

Instead...assessment is something that faculty do all the time - even at the program/department level. What often isn't done is the documentation of that assessment. So, the "closing the loop" may occur (curriculum changes, course requirements are modified, and new assignments added), but no one calls that "assessment". When faculty can see that they are doing assessment - and often doing it well, they may begin to see that assessment isn't as difficult or as onerous as they thought. They still may not love it (who loves the grading part of a class, for example??) but they can do it and they can use the data that they get to make modifications at the course, program, and even institutional level.

The other groups that get the bad names are the accreditation bodies. And, as one who has been an evaluator for two of them (NCA and SACS) I can tell you that most people working with these associations (volunteers and staff) are dedicated to doing what is right. However, because these accreditation mandates come "down" through the institutional administrative structure, it often seems as if the accreditation body is the "bad guy". Instead, they are really a buffer between institutions (and the freedom to have individualized missions and to measure outcomes in ways that we individually define) and the federal government. Besides, "them is us." Each institution is a member of their regional accreditor. We should all take more time to work with the accreditation process and to ensure that it works for the ongoing improvement of higher education. Not because it gets us a "check mark" but because we should regularly look at what we are doing and continually try to improve.

Now...don't even get me started on the "voluntary" system of accountability....yikes!

And the next is from an associate dean and director of the center for teaching excellence at another Big Ten university.

I have definitely run into this attitude about assessment in pockets throughout our university. However, I will say that faculty responses vary considerably across disciplines and domains. Faculty in domains w/o a history of outcomes assessment often bring up the comparison to NCLB and the spectre of standardized testing of learning outcomes for college students.

The concern is quite understandable given the push by the Spelling's Commission of past years, the marketing of certain instruments, and the lack of familiarity/history with the process. When you add the sometimes indiscriminate assumption that models developed for one field apply just as well in other fields, the hullabaloo is also predictable, but again, only in some disciplines.

For faculty in many of the fields that undergo specialized (disciplinary) accreditation, outcomes assessment is old news. And some of the faculty in those fields will even admit that the process has been useful for updating and improving their curricula. However, having been involved in Student Learning Outcomes Assessment for awhile, there is indeed cause for frustration for faculty new to SLOA. Most of the examples/models come from a relatively restricted number of fields and there is a dearth of models that humanities and social science faculty find useful. What works in business, engineering, education, or the health sciences, doesn't necessarily work well, or even make sense in English, cultural anthropology, or political science! We have found that the model from Communications has a lot of cross-over appeal.

Faculty experiences with specialized accrediting bodies might be another reason that some faculty assume that the regional accreditation org. will be very prescriptive. The specialized (disciplinary) accreditation bodies _do_ spell out pretty specific student learning outcomes. If you were a faculty member new to SLOA, and heard about a model from engineering and all about ABET's a-k outcomes, you might reasonably be expected to extrapolate that the regional accreditors would also be as prescriptive. In actuality, the regional accreditors exist at a completely different scale--just like a map of the US is much less detailed than a city map.

While some faculty were hoping that learning outcomes would disappear with a change of administration and the disbanding of the Spelling's Comm., it hasn't.

In addition, some faculty do not realize that messages about standardized assessment processes are generally not coming from the regional accreditors. In fact, CHEA (Council for Higher Ed Accreditation) worked diligently at the federal level to preserve institutional and faculty autonomy in specifying what outcomes are appropriate for the institution and its programs.

All of the regional accreditation organizations are quite committed to faculty engagement and faculty-driven student learning outcomes assessment. They are not about to tell the [philosophy] faculty what students in the philosophy program should know or be able to do by the time they graduate. Nor are regional accrediting bodies going to tell the [philosophy] faculty what courses they should be teaching. [replace with discipline of your choice]

I agree with Louis that assessment evidence can indeed be misused, but when that happens, it is generally not by the regional accreditation organizations. Some institutions get into trouble with their accreditation organization by not taking the process seriously. Others suffer because decisions are made internally within the institution to try to shoehorn all programs/disciplines into a single model that does not respect disciplinary differences in what constitutes evidence or how students learn in the field. The most commonly transferred models are uniform, homogeneous, linear, and sequential, which just doesn't work in some fields.

Frankly, it might be very interesting if [your] faculty did develop some principles of assessment. At least they'd be engaged in a discussion of what it means, and that could be a good step forward. You'd be able to provide a great service by being extremely familiar with just what the North Central accreditation organization is requesting. Your knowledge could help deflect some of the fear back toward a more productive conversation about student learning. I cannot tell you how many times I've heard comments about what Middle States (our regional org) wants, says, etc.

Hopefully, interested PODers will able to talk about this extensively at the POD conference! I think faculty developers have a unique contribution to make to discussions of institutional and program outcomes assessment.

New issue of Peer Review

The new Winter 2009 issue of the AAC&U publication, Peer Review, is now available. Some full-length articles from this issue are available online. Please take a look.

This issue focuses on AAC&U's VALUE project and provides an overview of new assessment approaches, including the use of rubrics - which measure a broad set of important learning outcomes - on samples of student work collected in e-portfolios. Articles address rubric development, e-portfolios for learning and assessment, assessment processes, and the use of assessment results for individual, program, and institutional improvements.

The Bologna Process III

Here's the podcast from NPR's program, Talk of the Nation, on April 14. The topic is the Bologna Process, "tuning," and three states' decision to emulate what they've been doing in higher education in Europe over the past decade.

The Bologna Process II

Here's Inside Higher Ed's take on the move by three states that's reported in the immediately preceding post. Some quotes:

In a major new effort to assure rigor and relevance for college degrees at various levels, three states are today formally launching a project aimed at “tuning” academic programs in six fields of study.

“Tuning,” borrowed from Europe’s Bologna Process, involves research and surveys of faculty members, students and employers, and consultation with business and government leaders, to determine exactly what a degree in a given field stands for in terms of students’ learning and competencies. Europe embarked on tuning as part of an effort to make degrees across the continent interchangeable, so that a bachelor’s degree in chemistry in Italy would mean roughly the same as one in the Netherlands, and that graduate programs and employers could thus know what a given degree would represent.

In the United States, the three states starting such efforts today are Indiana (in education, history and chemistry), Utah (in history and physics), and Minnesota (in graphic design and chemistry). The effort is being led by the Lumina Foundation for Education.

A general theme of the effort is that degrees will have more meaning if there is a consensus about what they mean, and if that consensus is based on learning objectives and skills, not credits earned or courses completed.

An earlier Inside Higher Ed article about the Bologna Process.

The Bologna Process I

I’ve been intending to write something about the Bologna Process, but I’ve procrastinated. Now Stan Katz has forced my hand. In the April 9 Chronicle of Higher Education, Katz blogs about the Lumina Foundation’s project to extend Europe’s Bologna Process to the U.S. The aim of the project in Europe is “to create a shared understanding among higher education’s stakeholders of the subject-specific knowledge and transferable skills that students…must demonstrate upon completion of a degree program.” Katz writes that

The American effort will be led by groups in Indiana, Minnesota and Utah. Each of these states will “draft learning outcomes and map the relations between these outcomes and graduates’ employment options” in at least two academic disciplines. The intention is to design frameworks for the different degrees rather than to standardize curricula, with the hope that undergraduate education will be more responsive to changes in knowledge and its application, more relevant to “societal needs and workforce demands,” and more conducive to student transfer and retention.

Katz’s impetus for his blog post is a New York Times article reporting that “Indiana will draft learning standards for education, history and chemistry degrees; Utah for history and physics; and Minnesota for graphic design and chemistry.” According to the Times article,

The goal is to give universities, students and employers in a global economy enough quality assurance and comparability that wherever a student obtains a degree, it would stand for the same thing and be widely accepted.

In the United States, there is little understanding, or consensus, about what a particular degree at a particular institution stands for….

The article quotes Clifford Adelman, of the Institute for Higher Education Policy, who says

Go to a university catalog and look at the degree requirements for a particular discipline….It says something like, ‘You take Anthropology 101, then Anthro 207, then you have a choice of Anthro 310, 311, or 312. We require the following courses, and you’ve got to have 42 credits.’ That means absolutely nothing.

The new approach would detail specific skills to be learned:

If you’re majoring in chemistry, here is what I expect you to learn in terms of laboratory skills, theoretical knowledge, applications, the intersection of chemistry with other sciences, and broader questions of environment and forensics.

Here is a news release from the Lumina Foundation about the new project.

Here is the official website for the Bologna Process in Europe.

Stay tuned. There’s more to come and more to say about the Bologna Process.

Whoa! Not another post about Twitter?!

Yep. This one from an April 8 Chronicle of Higher Education article called Professor Encourages Students to Pass Notes During Class - via Twitter. Would this work?

AAC&U’s "Bringing Theory to Practice" project

From the AAC&U website:

The Bringing Theory to Practice Project…encourages colleges and universities to reassert their core purposes as educational institutions not only to advance learning and discovery, but to advance the potential and well-being of each individual student, and to advance education as a public good that sustains a civic society.

That language is a little too lofty and abstract for my tastes. Their next paragraph is a little more down-to-earth:

The Project supports campus-based initiatives that demonstrate how uses of engaged forms of learning, actively involving students both within and beyond the classroom, directly contribute to their cognitive, emotional, and civic development.

Today we received their second newsletter. Here are links to more information about the project and to their first and second newsletters.

Must we tweet if our students are to learn? Part 2

This article from the April 6 Chronicle of Higher Education briefly profiles 10 college professors and administrators who use Twitter to, allegedly, good effect. We’re most interested in those faculty members who may, perhaps, be using this new gizmo to enhance engagement among their students in ways that truly promote their learning. Take a look. Skip over those that have nothing to do with student learning. For those that do, can you be open minded? Could these techniques or something like them, work for you?

Must we tweet if our students are to learn? Part 1

Around these parts we’re convinced that if you can get your students engaged, they’re more likely to learn and succeed. The more puzzling question is how to get them engaged. There’s a growing chorus singing the praises of all the new technological possibilities that our students know well and that we ought to embrace too. Here’s a report, from the April 6 Chronicle of Higher Education, about a discussion (Building the Classroom of the Future: From iTunes to Twitter) between proponents and opponents of this position. Pay special attention to the comments from readers.

US faculty: Civic engagement, diversity important goals for undergraduate education

From the web site of the Higher Education Research Institute, we learn that while “helping students develop critical-thinking skills and discipline-specific knowledge remain at the forefront of faculty goals for undergraduate education,”

Compared to just three years ago, a significantly greater number of today's college teachers consider civic engagement and appreciation of racial and ethnic diversity important educational goals for undergraduates, according to a UCLA report on teaching faculty at the nation's colleges and universities.

The majority of college faculty (55.5 percent) nationwide now consider it "very important" or "essential" to "instill in students a commitment to community service," an increase of 19.1 percentage points since the survey was last conducted in 2004–05, and 75.2 percent indicate that they work to "enhance students' knowledge of and appreciation for other racial/ethnic groups," a gain of 17.6 percentage points over three years.

The report, "The American College Teacher: National Norms for the 2007–08 HERI Faculty Survey," is issued by the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) at the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at UCLA, which puts out the national faculty report triennially.

"Civic engagement and diversity are among the core values that many institutions articulate in their mission," said Sylvia Hurtado, a co-author of the report and director of HERI. "It is important that faculty now view this as essential in their work because they are charged with preparing students to live in today's diverse world. Students represent our best hope for social progress."

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

Assessing information literacy

In a post to the ASSESS listserv, James Moses reports on the Survey of American College Students: Student Evaluation of Information Literacy Instruction, published by the Primary Research Group. Some of the report’s findings:

• Most students find library instruction helpful. About 18.5% of students found the instruction that they received useless or largely useless while 31.72% considered it somewhat helpful and close to half considered it helpful or very helpful.
• Students in the hard sciences, social sciences and business/economics were the most likely to say that the training benefited them.
• 55% of the students in the sample felt that they were reasonably competent in using the various online databases offered by their college.
• The youngest students, those aged 19 and younger, were somewhat more likely to consider themselves not very competent in library skills, but even then only about 9% of them characterized themselves this way.
• Suburbanites were the most likely to consider themselves highly competent while those who grew up in rural areas were the least likely to consider themselves the same.
• 20.3% of students majoring in the social sciences thought of themselves as highly competent but only 4.17% of students majoring in education thought of themselves this way, a particularly frightening statistic, given that many of these students will become the next generation of primary school teachers.

Public health in your core curriculum?

Here are excerpts from an Inside Higher Ed story about a greater role for courses in public health in general/liberal education.

Ask 10 people what an educated citizen should study and you’re bound to get 10 different answers (albeit with some overlap). The Educated Citizen and Public Health Initiative continues to make its case that public health should make any such list, and recently released a set of recommendations for integrating public health into general and liberal education.

“This is not about professional education. This is about citizenship,” said Susan Albertine, co-author of Recommendations for Undergraduate Public Health Education.

“One of the great benefits will be that more people will choose health professions when we desperately need them. But a lot of it is about the fundamental concept that educated citizens make better choices…."

"One of the attractions of public health to the liberal arts is it is interdisciplinary, inherently so. We are trying to utilize people's existing expertise, existing interest, and give them the tools to make the job easier…."

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

Growth in online learning - Quantity: Yes, Quality: ?

A new article in U.S. News & World Report deals mostly with the rapidly growing availability of online courses and their increasing affordability. Interesting information, but not what I was most interested in. But if you keep reading, there turns out to be a fair amount of coverage about improvements in quality, such as the following excerpts.

And some long-established online colleges may kick-start a race to raise quality by publishing indicators of their students' satisfaction and progress at a new website that is expected to launch this spring.

Of course, price is only part of the equation. Even free classes can waste precious time if the students don't learn. There's still plenty of skepticism about the quality of online classes.

A recent survey of professors found that nearly half of those who had taught an online course felt that online students received an inferior education. Plenty of students also feel burned. Rosie Joseph, 20, of Cincinnati dropped out of her University of Phoenix finance courses last year after two of her four instructors failed to respond promptly enough to her E-mails asking for explanations. "They weren't helpful at all," she says. The clincher for her: She called up local employers to see if they would hire someone with an online degree, and at least one said, "We don't encourage it," Joseph says.

Analysts say the market and technological forces that are driving down prices will cause some schools to improve services and quality. In fact, many online colleges are responding to complaints like Joseph's. The University of Phoenix, the University of West Florida, and additional online schools require instructors to respond to student queries quickly, typically within 24 hours. The schools usually check up on professors by surveying students. Some online schools, such as Tiffin University's Ivy Bridge online two-year college, go even further, hiring "coaches" or "advisers" who call or E-mail students regularly to encourage them and resolve complaints. And some schools are trying to ensure quality by limiting online courses to about 20 students each.

Many colleges are also ratcheting up the rigor of online schoolwork. Online courses now typically require students to post gradable comments about each week's assignment, which means that online students can't sit in the back of the class hoping the professor won't call on them. And several schools are cracking down on cheating. Some professors now require online students to collaborate on projects using software that shows who made what changes, so they'll know if any team members slacked off. Troy University in Alabama requires online students who want to take their tests at home to install software that locks down their Web browsers and a spy camera so that remote observers can make sure they don't cheat.

Colleges are also trying to make online courses more engaging by moving beyond simple reading assignments and videotaped lectures. Jeannette E. Riley, named the best online teacher for 2008 by the Sloan Consortium, uses and assigns podcasts and videos in her online English and women's studies classes at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth. Good online courses require more work on the part of instructors and students, which can pay off in more learning, she says. "I love online teaching because no one can hide. Every voice is heard."

Just for fun. Skip this one if you're in a serious mood.

Using Facebook to increase student engagement

The latest issue of Innovate: Journal of Online Education contains a report of a couple of chemistry professors' use of Facebook to increase their students' interaction with themselves and fellow students. Did it work? Did it help? Well, it seems like something that's well worth considering. Take a look.

Educating global citizens

Today's Inside Higher Ed includes a link to an audio podcast in which Peter Stearns (George Mason University) discusses some of the main ideas from his book, Educating Global Citizens in Colleges and Universities. The link above takes you to a brief note about the book and the link to the podcast follows that note.

I'm posting this item for two reasons. First, the general/liberal education programs at many colleges and universities include some kind of global/world community element. At my university, for instance, every undergraduate degree program includes one or more courses intended to "engender in students a greater appreciation of their membership in a world community marked by vast diversities of every type."

Second, one of the proven high-impact educational practices (HIEPs) that are being promoted by people like George Kuh and organizations like AAC&U is the one called "Diversity/Global Learning." I call it a proven HIEP because by now there's a significant amount of research showing that, carried out properly, programs falling into this category stimulate increased student engagement and enhance student success. Here's Kuh's brief description of "Diversity/Global Learning."

Many colleges and universities now emphasize courses and programs that help students explore cultures, life experiences, and worldviews different from their own. These studies - which may address U.S. diversity, world cultures, or both - often explore "difficult differences" such as racial, ethnic, and gender inequality, or continuing struggles around the globe for human rights, freedom, and power. Frequently, intercultural studies are augmented by experiential learning in the community and/or by study abroad.

What do you want your students to be doing 20 years from now?

You've heard the simile: Like drinking from a firehose. Well that's what it's like as I open up to the various sources of news, information, and ideas about student success, assessment, general/liberal education, and related topics. Case in point: Below are excerpts from a recent post on a blog I've just discovered: Tomorrow's Professor.

What does it mean to be literate? Different disciplines appear to require their own definition of literacy. Scientific literacy, mathematical literacy, computer literacy, cultural literacy, and music literacy are just a few of its many forms. Literacy certainly varies from one discipline to another, or does it?

Long ago, young children played beside their parents. They watched adults tending crops, making arrows, governing the community, or completing other tasks. Through play and daily observations, children learned about adult roles. Adults who learned to fill these roles were probably considered literate in their societies. The roles they had to fill were those of lifelong learners, productive workers, active citizens, and able mentors, parents, and role models for the next generation.

Today, children amass large quantities of isolated skills and knowledge with the hope they will be able apply these when they become adults. They learn to a large extent in the absence of viewing adults participating in more than one or two roles.
Are today's children any more literate and prepared to face the challenges of adult roles than the children of the past? Do we equip the children of today with the skills and knowledge to be literate citizens of the 21st century?

Over the course of more than thirty years, I have asked a wide variety of educators in the United States this question: What do you want the students you are teaching today to be doing 20 years from now? As I reviewed the answers, I began to see a pattern. The roles educators envision for their students are similar to those of the past; that is, lifelong learners, productive workers, active citizens, and able mentors.

People who fill these roles need the basic skills of reading, writing, mathematics, understanding scientific proof, and working with people. In addition, they must know how to learn, solve problems, make informed decisions, and support the learning of others.

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

On a TAIR...

The Texas Association for Institutional Research held their annual conference recently in Lubbock (Go, Red Raiders!). Many of their conference presentations are available for download online, and quite a few have to do with assessment, accreditation, and related subjects, in addition to some other things you might find interesting.

Take a look!