"What's really special is watching the bonds form."

Here are excerpts from an article in today's USA Today about the value of learning communities for developmental students. The article features a community college, but my university has learning communities too, and this appears to be one of the most effective of the high-impact educational practices.

Shayla Dinh learned two key things about math this spring.

One: She can do it.

Two: She likes doing it.

"I love math. I never thought I'd say that," says Dinh, 34, who recently passed the first math class she has taken in more than a decade. It was a remedial course, taught here on the main campus of Northern Virginia Community College...and it was her first big hurdle toward getting a bachelor's degree in communications.

The course was part of...a learning community; students who enrolled in her math class also were required to take a course called College Success Skills, covering topics such as note-taking, time management and test anxiety. Counselor Ray Jones taught that course. But he and Thimblin coordinated efforts, and much of their emphasis was on helping students help one another and themselves.

Learning communities represent one of several ideas being tried nationwide as educators search for better ways to help more students succeed in college. The strategy also reflects a shift in the conversation about whom should be held responsible when a student struggles.

"It is not just the individual student rising or falling on his or her merits," says John Dever, NOVA's executive vice president for academic and student affairs. "If large numbers of students aren't making it through, it's a question of, is the program structure successful?"

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

Taking student retention seriously: Rethinking the first year of college

Vincent Tinto's speech with this title was delivered in 2002. But it was featured in today's issue of the Innovative Educators newsletter. He has some interesting things to say about student engagement, especially in the first year, learning communities, and related topics. Here's a little of what he said. After reading these excerpts, I hope you'll want to read the entire speech.

...while many colleges have adopted a variety of programs to enhance retention, most programs are add-ons that are marginal to the academic life of the institution. Too many colleges have adopted what Parker Palmer calls the “add a course” strategy. Need to address the issue of diversity? Add a course in diversity studies. Need to address the success of new students? Add a freshman seminar. Need to address student retention? Bring in a consultant and establish a committee or office charged with that responsibility. The result is a growing segmentation of services for students into increasingly autonomous fiefdoms whose functional responsibilities are reinforced by separate budget and promotion systems. Therefore, while it is true that retention programs abound on our campuses, most institutions, in my view, have not taken student retention seriously.

What would it mean for an institution to take student retention seriously? Among other things, it would mean that institutions stop tinkering at the margins of institutional life and make enhancing student retention the linchpin about which they organize their activities. It would mean that institutions move beyond the “adding-on” of services by recognizing that the roots of attrition lies not only in their students but also in the very character of the settings in which they ask their students to learn; settings which are now taken for granted as “natural” to higher education.

Well what about the research? What does it tell us about the conditions which foster student retention? First, it tells us that students are more likely to persist and graduate in settings that take advising seriously; that provide clear, consistent, and easily accessible information about institutional requirements, that help students understand the roadmap to completion, and help them understand how they use that roadmap to decide upon and achieve personal goals. Second, students are more likely to persist and graduate in settings that provide support - academic, social, and personal - in ways which is both available and connected to other parts of their collegiate experience. Third, students are more likely to persist and graduate in settings that involve them as valued members of the institution. Frequency and quality of contact with faculty, staff, and students has repeatedly been shown to be an independent predictor of student persistence. This is true for large and small colleges, rural and urban colleges, public and private colleges, and for two and four-year colleges and universities. It is true for women as well as men, for students of color as well as for anglo students, and for parttime as well as full time students. Simply put, involvement matters and at no point does it matter more than during the first year when student attachments are so tenuous and the pull of the institution so weak. Finally and most importantly, the research tells us that student learning is the root of student persistence. Students who learn, are students who stay. Institutions that are successful in building settings that educate their students, all students, not just some, are institutions that are successful in retaining their students.

The research in this regard could not be clearer. Students who find support for their learning, receive frequent feedback about their learning and are actively involved in learning, especially with others, are more likely to learn and in turn more likely to stay. Unfortunately, it remains the case that most first year students experience learning as isolated learners whose learning is disconnected from that of others. They continue to engage in solo performance and demonstration in what remains a largely show-and-tell learning environment. Their experience of learning is still very much a "spectator sport" in which faculty talk dominates and where there are few active student participants. It is little wonder then that students seem so uninvolved in learning. Their learning experiences are not very involving.

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

Assessment Miami Style

An article in today's Chronicle of Higher Education summarizes the college-wide assessment program at Miami Dade College. The article begins like this:

In 2007 the faculty at my institution, Miami Dade College, joined the student body in signing a covenant "to build a foundation for the success of future students." The event capped a two-year effort on the part of the faculty to articulate the foundations of a 21st-century college education and codify them into 10 clear statements.

However, creating a top-10 list of what we want our students to learn was only part of a larger mission — one we began in 2005, in response to a national dialogue on openness and accountability, fostered by the Association of American Colleges and Universities. Since then, our journey has been navigated by various faculty committees that not only developed our list of goals, but are also working to develop assessment tools and curriculum-mapping processes.

The next logical step was to measure our success at teaching those essential skills. In a report released this month, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in fact called on community colleges to improve their assessment skills. While "outcomes assessment" is a hateful phrase to many, and while quantifying a college education in concrete terms may seem distasteful, outcome assessments can be accomplished while preserving professors' individuality and freedom in course design. Proving the attainment of set standards often evokes fears of "teaching to the test," but we see assessments as opportunities to design creative, thought-provoking challenges.

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

Colleges need improved assessment tools to improve basic skills instruction

According to a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education,

To improve the success rates of students who are unprepared for college-level work, community colleges must develop richer forms of student-learning assessment, analyze the data to discover best teaching practices, and get faculty members more involved in the assessment process, according to a report released on Tuesday by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Traditional uses of institutional data, like grades and test scores, often fail to involve faculty members or do not encourage them to think about how they could improve their teaching, says the report, Toward Informative Assessment and a Culture of Evidence. Those measures should be expanded to include more informative assessments such as value-added tests, common exams across course sections, and recordings of students reasoning their way through problem sets, the report says.

...

"It requires a commitment and a sea change at the top," he said. "You've got to bring academics together for the explicit purpose of discussing instruction and learning, rather than just faculty schedules and vacation time."

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

Colleges moving away from pure "cafeteria-style" general education requirements

Today AAC&U announced the findings of a new survey on trends in undergrad general education. Here are a few excerpts:

The survey of chief academic officers at 433 colleges and universities of all sorts (public and private, two-year and four-year, large and small) suggests that many colleges and universities are reforming their general education programs and developing new curricular approaches and ways to assess key learning outcomes. As institutions review their general education programs, many are choosing to incorporate more engaged and integrative curricular practices.

Only 15 percent of colleges and universities are now using a cafeteria-style general education program alone. More than two-thirds of colleges and universities use a model that combines course choice with other integrative features like learning communities or thematic required courses.

For example:

• 41 percent of institutions report incorporating common intellectual experiences
• 36 percent use thematic required courses
• 33 percent now have upper-level general education requirements, and
• 24 percent use learning communities in which a group of students take the same set of courses linked to a common theme.

Assessing General Education Outcomes

Almost all of the institutions surveyed (89 percent) are in some stage of either assessing or modifying their general education program. Assessment of cumulative learning outcomes in general education is, in fact, now becoming the norm. Fifty-two percent of institutions are currently assessing cumulative learning outcomes in general education beyond the level of individual course grades, with another 42 percent reporting that they are planning for assessment of cumulative general education learning outcomes.

Assessments of cumulative learning in general education vary widely, with 40 percent using rubrics applied to examples of student work, 37 percent assessing culminating or capstone projects, 26 percent using national tests of general skills, and another 23 percent using locally developed examinations.
Few institutions are using standardized national tests of general knowledge, such as science or the humanities, however. Only sixteen percent of those surveyed report using such tests.

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

Faculty Focus

If I were you (and in many ways, I am), I'd be very wary about signing up for online newsletters, email updates, etc. You might consider this one, though. Faculty Focus gives you access to a lot of materials that you may find very useful in promoting your students' learning. I've subscribed to their email updates, and the latest one is about ways to get students involved in class discussions. On some of the topics they cover, they make some pretty substantial documents available for download. And if you explore their web site, you'll find that there's really a huge amount of potentially useful information there.

Generation NeXt comes to college

This is not a commercial.

This guy came to our university and made a presentation to a small group of faculty and staff. And we can't wait to have him back again to meet with a larger group. You can hire him, and he's well worth it. But even if you just visit his web site, you'll find lots of good stuff about how to engage students for the purpose of promoting their learning.

The young people of Generation NeXt (up to about 26 years old) are different from previous generations of college students. Few schools understand these differences well enough to respond effectively to bring about meaningful learning and developmental outcomes.

The products of a technology rich, consumer driven culture, Generation NeXt presents special challenges to the purposes, structures and methods of colleges and universities; challenges complicated by the generational differences between these young people and the Traditionals, Baby Boomers and Xers who predominate faculty and staff.

For most students there is a serious mismatch between what they want and expect from a school, and what we offer. The expectations by many students of academic success with little effort is distressing and confusing to faculty and staff. Few in academia report seeing the much anticipated "Millennial generation" in significant numbers (conventional conformists respectful of social norms and institutions, trusting of adults, focused on grades and performance, etc.) and many are troubled by the difficulty they are having helping students persist to meaningful learning outcomes, and to graduation.

Engaging learners using fun, interactive, educational games/activities

Here's an online presentation (video plus audio) containing lots of very cool ways to use technology that just about all of us have some facility with to make our teaching much more engaging and interesting. Download the documents mentioned in the program by clicking on "Attachments" just below the video screen.

Pay attention!

Red herring arguments against assessment

Here's another brief exchange on the ASSESS listserv about logical fallacies in arguments made against assessment.

This is a continuation of the discussion on logical fallacies and emotional responses that was initiated two weeks ago. I will use this discussion to develop a workshop on how my assessment peers address these issues. I will share the workshop with the assessment list serve when it is completed.

I will post a brief description of the fallacy and provide examples of how the fallacy might express itself. I would be interested in receiving additional examples of this type of logical fallacy and know how list serve participants have addressed this fallacy. I will continue to present fallacies until I have exhausted my list and then ask for a list of your favorites. I would like to address discuss emotional responses and how to address them at a later time.

This time I would like to suggest the “Red Herring” fallacy.“ This fallacy occurs when an attempt is made to divert attention to another issue that is irrelevant to the topic under discussion. When this occurs you find yourself dealing with a lot of extraneous issues. It is equivalent to changing the topic when you are no longer winning the argument.

This sort of reasoning is fallacious because it simply provides a distraction that misdirects an examination of the issues.

Example 1

As mentioned by one of the posts on the last discussion many times illogical responses are a result of people simply not wanting to do assessment. This position represents a boundary conflict because the people are resisting the additional workload associated with documenting assessment and we representing an institutional need that must be addressed. Since it is more difficult to justify lack of support for institutional needs people may attempt to shift the focus of the discussion to values or philosophical beliefs. By representing the boundary aspects of the conflict as a values conflict it not only limits possibilities for resolution but misdirects the focus of the discussion. This represents a red herring because it diverts attention from the source of the conflict to another more difficult to address area

Example 2

We cannot assess student learning because our learning outcomes are dependent upon the quality of our students. We need to increase standards before we can be expected to perform assessment and besides we have transfer students we cannot be held responsible.

Example 3

Why doesn’t the Assessment Office just give a standardized test? The institution will support the test administration. This may ignore the fact that there is no alignment between the these generic tests and the curriculum. Furthermore, even if the test was given there would be no commitment to using the data for programmatic improvement. This would represent a herring because it distracts from development of meaningful assessment through focusing attention on simply giving a test.

Looking forward to your responses. Thanks

"Straw men in the field, scape goats in the pasture, red herrings in the lake, this has got to be a conspiracy."

Stephen Zerwas
Director of Academic Assessment
The University of North Carolina Greensboro

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Oh, I’m sure we can add to this one:

Example 1:

We didn’t need this assessment back in my day when people respected education. Nowadays professors get no respect. It’s all sports stars and Hollywood types some of whom have no talent whatsoever, and what about all those reality-show clowns? The classics aren’t respected anymore. Politicians, who are ignorant, just want irrelevant data so that they can browbeat us all the more. This is part and parcel of the degraded state of culture in this country. Moreover, when I was a student they said “look to your right and look to your left—one of you won’t make it.” You were expected to work hard not to be that one and you would be that one if you didn’t have the goods. Now we are expected to keep all three and show that they learned something, whether they had any ability or not.

Example 2:

The Federal (or state) government is just doing this because they want to cut our funding. They want a dollar’s worth of control for a dime’s worth of support. They are increasing regulation in all areas—just look at the requirements of the new Higher Education Act. We’re going to have to hire extra staff to meet all these silly disclosure requirements and then we won’t be able to afford to hire the faculty we need. Our class sizes will increase and the students won’t get as good an education. What good does all this do? It just takes time away from the time we can spend with our students, and everybody knows that is the main thing promoting quality in education.

Each of these has a valid point but not one that prevails.

Patricia DeWitt
Asst VP for Planning and Institutional Effectiveness
Shorter College

Frequently-made objections to assessment

Take a look at this list of frequently-made objections to assessment and suggestions for how to respond to them.

Straw man arguments against assessment

Recently on the ASSESS listserv there was a discussion about logical fallacies that often arise in arguments made against conducting academic assessment. I've compiled the contributions to that listserv thread in a Word document that you can download. I've only corrected a few spelling or punctuation errors and deleted some irrelevant stuff. Here's the post that started the discussion:

As a Director of Assessment involved with reform and assessment efforts at our institution, I have seen a wide variety of resistance that are either highly emotional or illogical or in some cases both. This has prompted me to examine logical fallacies for the purpose of identifying their components and formulating appropriate responses. I would like to elicit input from others who have seen these forms of resistance and identify what strategies were used to effectively address them.

I would like to use this discussion to develop a workshop on how to address these issues that I will share with the assessment list serve when it is completed. I would like to post a brief description of the fallacy and an explanation of why it is a fallacy and ask list serve participants to identify ways in which the fallacy manifested itself at their institution and what was done to address the fallacy. I will work my way through a variety of fallacies until I have exhausted my list and then ask for a list of your favorites. Likewise I would like to discuss emotional responses and how to address them. I will also provide illustrations of how these emotions may be expressed and ask for your input.

To start out I would like to discuss the “straw dog" or "straw man” (sorry for the sexism) fallacy. This fallacy occurs when a person ignores a person’s actual position and substitutes a distorted, exaggerated, or misrepresented version of that position. This sort of reasoning is fallacious because attacking a distorted version of a position simply does not constitute an attack on the position itself.

Example 1

Faculty in open meetings equate academic assessment required for accreditation as an example of “no child left behind” or “Spellings.” They launch into a long digression about the ills of both of these initiatives without demonstrating awareness of how the intents, purposes, and implementation of these approaches are substantially different from academic assessment.

Example 2

A faculty member describes the deficiencies of the use of standardized tests and uses these limitations as a justification for not doing assessment at all. Equating assessment with the misuses of standardized tests and emphasizing how inappropriate it is of me, as an assessment director, to be forcing standardized tests on an unsuspecting public. This is a position that I have never endorsed or advocated. If anything I would have used this as a justification for multiple measures recognizing the limitations of any measure.

Can you give any other examples of “Straw Dog," "Straw Man” fallacies and how you have addressed them?

Looking forward to your responses. Thanks

Stephen Zerwas
Director of Academic Assessment
University of North Carolina Greensboro

“Sticks and stones…

…but words will never hurt me.”

Don’t be so sure, according to Linda Adler-Kassner and Susanmarie Harrington, writing in Inside Higher Ed,

As we engage in discussions about assessment on and off our campuses, inside and outside of our classrooms, it’s important to consider the broader frames surrounding these discussions. [The term] “Accountability” doesn’t do education or educators any favors. The bigger story associated with this term has to do with corruption, mismanagement, and ineptitude. Unless we believe that those are the right shoes for us to fill – and we don’t think that they are – we would do well to invoke other language, other stories, in our discussions.

Responsibility and visibility are two that work well for these purposes, and we might do well to consider how to enact the principles underscoring these terms as we engage in important research designed to improve student learning.

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

More Meaningful Accreditation

Inside Higher Ed reports on new thinking from one of the six major regional accrediting agencies about the tension between accountability and improvement of student learning. Selected quotes:

Sylvia Manning has heard all the complaints about accreditation before -- heck, she thought a lot of them herself during her nearly 40 years as a college administrator. Colleges find the process to be a mere obligation because it focuses on minimum standards and too often produces little of value to help the institutions improve. Critics who want more higher education accountability question whether accreditation is rigorous and transparent enough. Potential educational innovators say the process is inflexible and discourages creative approaches.

The critiques flow largely from the fact that higher education accreditation seeks to do two totally different things: ensure a minimum level of quality (with the accreditors in effect playing a compliance role on behalf of the federal government) and encourage individual colleges to improve themselves.

Manning, who nine months ago became president of the country's largest regional accreditor, the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, almost immediately appointed a committee to rethink the commission's approval process with those and other critiques in mind. This week, at the commission's annual meeting here, she unveiled a proposal to overhaul the accrediting agency's process for renewing its approval for already accredited colleges.

Its most distinctive feature is that it would clearly separate "compliance" from "improvement." Colleges would be required to build "portfolios" of data and materials, documenting (through more frequent peer reviews) their compliance with the association's many standards, with much of the information being made public. On a parallel track, or "pathway," colleges would have the flexibility to propose their own projects or themes as the focus of the self-improvement piece of their accreditation review, and would be judged (once the projects were approved by a peer team) by how well they carried out the plan

The commission's goals…are to ensure rigor and transparency in the compliance part of the review process…, reduce the paperwork burden on institutions…, and make the process more valuable for colleges by letting them largely define for themselves where they want to improve and what they want to accomplish.

Mainly what happens in the current structure, she said, is that the compliance role is so onerous and so dominates the process that, in too many cases, colleges fail to get anything meaningful out of the improvement portion. That, she said, is why separating the two is so essential.

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

Even lectures can be engaging

Here's more from Rob Weir about how to get students more engaged in a lecture format.

Promoting early, active discussion in online courses

This article has some good ideas for promoting student engagement in online courses.