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Nils Peterson

2009 Annual Meeting | Conference Program - 0 views

www.aacu.org/...program.cfm

shared by Nils Peterson on 22 Jan 09 - Cached
  • This session explores the notion that assessment for transformational learning is best utilized as a learning tool. By providing timely, transparent, and appropriate feedback, both to students and to the institution itself, learning is enhanced – a far different motive for assessment than is external accountability.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 22 Jan 09
       
      need to get to these guys with our harvesting gradebook ideas...
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 22 Jan 09
       
      decided to attend another session. Hersh was OK before lunch, but the talk by Pan looks more promising
  • Academic and corporate communities agree on the urgent need for contemporary, research-based pedagogies of engagement in STEM fields. Participants will learn how leaders from academic departments and institutions have collaborated with leaders from the corporate and business community in regional networks to ensure that graduates meet the expectations of prospective employers and the public.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 22 Jan 09
       
      here is another session with links to CTLT work, both harvesting gradebook and the ABET work
  • Professor Pan will discuss the reflective teaching methods used to prepare students to recognize and mobilize community assets as they design, implement, and evaluate projects to improve public health.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 22 Jan 09
       
      Students tasked to learn about a community, ride the bus, make a Doc appt. Then tasked to do a non-clinical health project in that community (they do plenty of clinical stuff elsewhere in the program). Project must build capacity in the community to survive after the student leaves. Example. Work with hispanic parents in Sacramento about parenting issue, ex getting kids to sleep on time. Student had identified problem in the community, but first project idea was show a video, which was not capacity building. Rather than showing the video, used the video as a template and made a new video. Families were actors. Result was spanish DVD that the community could own. Pan thinks this is increased capacity in the community.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Freshman Survey annually examines the academic habits of mind of entering first-year students.  Along with academic involvement, the survey examines diversity, civic engagement, college admissions and expectations of college. 
  • The project aims to promote faculty and student assessment of undergraduate research products in relation to outcomes associated with basic research skills and general undergraduate learning principles (communication and quantitative reasoning, critical thinking, and integration and application of knowledge).
  • They focus educators on the magnitude of the challenge to prepare an ever-increasingly diverse, globally-connected student body with the knowledge, ability, processes, and confidence to adapt to diverse environments and respond creatively to the enormous issues facing humankind.
  • One challenge of civic engagement in the co-curriculum is the merging of cost and outcome: creating meaningful experiences for students and the community with small staffs, on small budgets, while still having significant, purposeful impact. 
  • a)claims that faculty are the sole arbiters of what constitutes a liberal education and b) counter claims that student life professionals also possess the knowledge and expertise critical to defining students’ total learning experiences.  
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 22 Jan 09
       
      also, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
  • This session introduces a three-year national effort to document how colleges and universities are using assessment data to improve teaching and learning and to facilitate the dissemination and adoption of best practices in the assessment of college learning outcomes.
  • Exciting pedagogies of engagement abound, including undergraduate research, community-engaged learning, interdisciplinary exploration, and international study.  However, such experiences are typically optional and non-credit-bearing for students, and/or “on top of” the workload for faculty. This session explores strategies for integrating engaged learning into the institutional fabric (curriculum, student role, faculty role) and increasing access to these transformative experiences.
  • hands-on experiential learning, especially in collaboration with other students, is a superior pedagogy but how can this be provided in increasingly larger introductory classes? 
  • As educators seek innovative ways to manage knowledge and expand interdisciplinary attention to pressing global issues, as students and parents look for assurances that their tuition investment will pay professional dividends, and as alumni look for meaningful ways to give back to the institutions that nurtured and prepared them, colleges and universities can integrate these disparate goals through the Guilds, intergenerational membership networks that draw strength from the contributions of all of their members.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 22 Jan 09
       
      see Theron's ideas for COMM.
  • Civic engagement learning derives its power from the engagement of students with real communities—local, national, and global. This panel explores the relationship between student learning and the contexts in which that learning unfolds by examining programs that place students in diverse contexts close to campus and far afield.
  • For institutional assessment to make a difference for student learning its results must result in changes in classroom practice. This session explores ways in which the institutional assessment of student learning, such as the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education and the Collegiate Learning Assessment, can be connected to our classrooms.
  • Interdisciplinary Teaching and Object-Based Learning in Campus Museums
  • To address pressing needs of their communities, government and non-profit agencies are requesting higher education to provide education in an array of human and social services. To serve these needs effectively, higher educationneeds to broaden and deepen its consultation with practitioners in designing new curricula. Colleges and universities would do well to consider a curriculum development model that requires consultation not only with potential employers, but also with practitioners and supervisors of practitioners.
  • Should Academics be Active? Campuses and Cutting Edge Civic Engagement
  • If transformational liberal education requires engaging the whole student across the educational experience, how can colleges and universities renew strategy and allocate resources effectively to support it?  How can assessment be used to improve student learning and strengthen a transformational learning environment? 
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 22 Jan 09
       
      Purpose of university is not to grant degrees, it has something to do with learning. Keeling's perspective is that the learning should be transformative; changing perspective. Liberating and emancipatory Learning is a complex interaction among student and others, new knowledge and experience, event, own aspirations. learners construct meaning from these elements. "we change our minds" altering the brain at the micro-level Brain imaging research demonstrates that analogical learning (abstract) demands more from more areas of the brain than semantic (concrete) learning. Mind is not an abstraction, it is based in the brain, a working physical organ .Learner and the environment matter to the learning. Seeds magazine, current issue on brain imaging and learning. Segway from brain research to need for university to educate the whole student. Uses the term 'transformative learning' meaning to transform the learning (re-wire the brain) but does not use transformative assessment (see wikipedia).
  • But as public debates roil, higher education has been more reactive than proactive on the question of how best to ensure that today’s students are fully prepared for a fast-paced future.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 22 Jan 09
       
      Bologna process being adopted (slowly) in EU, the idea is to make academic degrees more interchangeable and understandable across the EU three elements * Qualification Frameworks (transnational, national, disciplinary). Frameworks are graduated, with increasing expertise and autonomy required for the upper levels. They sound like broad skills that we might recognize in the WSU CITR. Not clear how they are assessed * Tuning (benchmarking) process * Diploma Supplements (licensure, thesis, other capstone activities) these extend the information in the transcript. US equivalent might be the Kuali Students system for extending the transcript. Emerging dialog on American capability This dialog is coming from 2 directions * on campus * employers Connect to the Greater Exceptions (2000-2005) iniative. Concluded that American HE has islands of innovation. Lead to LEAP (Liberal Education and America's Promise) Initiative (2005-2015). The dialog is converging because of several forces * Changes in the balance of economic and political power. "The rise of the rest (of the world)" * Global economy in which innovation is key to growth and prosperity LEAP attempts to frame the dialog (look for LEAP in AACU website). Miami-Dade CC has announced a LEAP-derived covenant, the goals must span all aspects of their programs. Define liberal education Knowledge of human cultures and the physical and natural world intellectual and practical skills responsibility integrative skills Marker of success is (here is where the Transformative Gradebook fits in): evidence that students can apply the essential learning outcomes to complex, unscripted problems and real-world settings Current failure -- have not tracked our progress, or have found that we are not doing well. See AACU employer survey 5-10% percent of current graduates taking courses that would meet the global competencies (transcript analysis) See NSSE on Personal and social responsibility gains, less tha
  • Dr. Pan will also talk about strategies for breaking down cultural barriers.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 24 Jan 09
       
      Pan. found a non-profit agency to be a conduit and coordinator to level the power between univ and grass roots orgs. helped with cultural gaps.
Nils Peterson

Views: Changing the Equation - Inside Higher Ed - 1 views

www.insidehighered.com/...bassis

shared by Nils Peterson on 25 Mar 10 - Cached
  • But each year, after some gnashing of teeth, we opted to set tuition and institutional aid at levels that would maximize our net tuition revenue. Why? We were following conventional wisdom that said that investing more resources translates into higher quality and higher quality attracts more resources
  • But each year, after some gnashing of teeth, we opted to set tuition and institutional aid at levels that would maximize our net tuition revenue. Why? We were following conventional wisdom that said that investing more resources translates into higher quality and higher quality attracts more resource
  • But each year, after some gnashing of teeth, we opted to set tuition and institutional aid at levels that would maximize our net tuition revenue. Why? We were following conventional wisdom that said that investing more resources translates into higher quality and higher quality attracts more resources
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • year we strug
  • year we strug
  • those who control influential rating systems of the sort published by U.S. News & World Report -- define academic quality as small classes taught by distinguished faculty, grand campuses with impressive libraries and laboratories, and bright students heavily recruited. Since all of these indicators of quality are costly, my college’s pursuit of quality, like that of so many others, led us to seek more revenue to spend on quality improvements. And the strategy worked.
  • Based on those concerns, and informed by the literature on the “teaching to learning” paradigm shift, we began to change our focus from what we were teaching to what and how our students were learning.
  • No one wants to cut costs if their reputation for quality will suffer, yet no one wants to fall off the cliff.
  • When quality is defined by those things that require substantial resources, efforts to reduce costs are doomed to failure
  • some of the best thinkers in higher education have urged us to define the quality in terms of student outcomes.
  • Faculty said they wanted to move away from giving lectures and then having students parrot the information back to them on tests. They said they were tired of complaining that students couldn’t write well or think critically, but not having the time to address those problems because there was so much material to cover. And they were concerned when they read that employers had reported in national surveys that, while graduates knew a lot about the subjects they studied, they didn’t know how to apply what they had learned to practical problems or work in teams or with people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds.
  • Our applications have doubled over the last decade and now, for the first time in our 134-year history, we receive the majority of our applications from out-of-state students.
  • We established what we call college-wide learning goals that focus on "essential" skills and attributes that are critical for success in our increasingly complex world. These include critical and analytical thinking, creativity, writing and other communication skills, leadership, collaboration and teamwork, and global consciousness, social responsibility and ethical awareness.
  • despite claims to the contrary, many of the factors that drive up costs add little value. Research conducted by Dennis Jones and Jane Wellman found that “there is no consistent relationship between spending and performance, whether that is measured by spending against degree production, measures of student engagement, evidence of high impact practices, students’ satisfaction with their education, or future earnings.” Indeed, they concluded that “the absolute level of resources is less important than the way those resources are used.”
  • After more than a year, the group had developed what we now describe as a low-residency, project- and competency-based program. Here students don’t take courses or earn grades. The requirements for the degree are for students to complete a series of projects, captured in an electronic portfolio,
  • students must acquire and apply specific competencies
  • Faculty spend their time coaching students, providing them with feedback on their projects and running two-day residencies that bring students to campus periodically to learn through intensive face-to-face interaction
  • After a year and a half, the evidence suggests that students are learning as much as, if not more than, those enrolled in our traditional business program
  • As the campus learns more about the demonstration project, other faculty are expressing interest in applying its design principles to courses and degree programs in their fields. They created a Learning Coalition as a forum to explore different ways to capitalize on the potential of the learning paradigm.
  • a problem-based general education curriculum
  • At the very least, finding innovative ways to lower costs without compromising student learning is wise competitive positioning for an uncertain future
  • the focus of student evaluations has changed noticeably. Instead of focusing almost 100% on the instructor and whether he/she was good, bad, or indifferent, our students' evaluations are now focusing on the students themselves - as to what they learned, how much they have learned, and how much fun they had learning.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 25 Mar 10
       
      gary diigoed this article. this comment shines another light -- the focus of the course eval shifted from faculty member to course & student learning when the focus shifted from teaching to learning
  • Gary Brown on 25 Mar 10
     
    A must read spotted by Jane Sherman--I've highlighed, as usual, much of it.
Theron DesRosier

Participatory Learning and the New Humanities: An Interview with Cathy Davidson | Acade... - 0 views

www.academiccommons.org/...ities-interview-cathy-davidson

digital humanities web2.0 pedagogy participatory social networking learning design

shared by Theron DesRosier on 05 Mar 09 - Cached
  • Theron DesRosier on 05 Mar 09
     
    "Participatory Learning includes the ways in which new technologies enable learners (of any age) to contribute in diverse ways to individual and shared learning goals. Through games, wikis, blogs, virtual environments, social network sites, cell phones, mobile devices, and other digital platforms, learners can participate in virtual communities where they share ideas, comment upon one another's projects, and plan, design, advance, implement, or simply discuss their goals and ideas together. Participatory learners come together to aggregate their ideas and experiences in a way that makes the whole ultimately greater than the sum of the parts."
  • S Spaeth on 09 Mar 09
     
    Theron helped me keep up with developments at HASTAC by socially sharing this bookmark and excerpt in the CTLT and Friends Group. I add this comment to acknowledge his contribution to my ongoing professional development. The comment function also gives me a link (perma?) to his bookmark.
Gary Brown

Graphic Display of Student Learning Objectives - ProfHacker - The Chronicle of Higher E... - 2 views

chronicle.com/...27863

outcomes graphics

shared by Gary Brown on 20 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Creating SLOs or goals for a course is simple to us, usually.  We want students to learn certain skills, we create assignments that will help students reach those goals, and we’ll judge how well they have learned those skills. 
  • This graphic displays the three learning objectives for the course, and it connects the course assignment to the learning objectives.  Students can see—at a glance—that work none of course assignments are random or arbitrary (an occasional student complaint), but that each assignment links directly to a course learning objective.
  • The syllabus graphic is quite simple and it’s one that students easily understand.  Additionally, I use an expanded graphic (below) when thinking about small goals within the larger learning objectives.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • In fact, The Graphic Syllabus and the Outcomes Map: Communicating Your Course (Linda Nilson) is an interesting way to organize graphically an entire course.
  • An example of a graphic syllabus can be found in Dr. W. Mark Smillie’s displays of his philosophy courses [.pdf file].
  • Some students won’t care.  Moreover, they rarely remember the connection between course content and assignments.  The course and the assignments can all seem random and arbitrary.  Nevertheless, some students will care, and some will appreciate the connections.
  • Gary Brown on 20 Oct 10
     
    Perhaps useful resource
Theron DesRosier

The Learning in Informal and Formal Environments (LIFE) Center » Blog Archive... - 0 views

life-slc.org/?p=498

Bransford 21st century learning skills

shared by Theron DesRosier on 03 Mar 09 - Cached
  • Theron DesRosier on 03 Mar 09
     
    In 2004, the LIFE Center and the Center for Multicultural Education at the University of Washington established the LIFE Diversity Panel. The Panel's goal was to summarize important principles that educational practitioners, policy makers, and researchers can use to build upon the learning that occurs in the homes and community cultures of students from diverse groups. We are pleased to announce the culmination of this two year consensus process. On May 11th, 2007, the centers released the consensus report produced by the LIFE Diversity Panel called Learning In and Out of School in Diverse Environments: Life-Long, Life-Wide, and Life-Deep. A major assumption of this report is that if educators make use of the informal learning that occurs in the homes and communities of students, the achievement gap between marginalized students and mainstream students can be reduced.
Jayme Jacobson

Fostering Learning in the Networked World: The Cyberlearning Opportunity and Challenge ... - 0 views

209.85.173.132/search

core skill s 21st century learning transmedia navigation distributed cognition

shared by Jayme Jacobson on 11 Mar 09 - Cached
  • Participatory culture: 21st Century Media Education “We have also identified a set of core social skills and cultural competencies that young people should acquire if they are to be full, active, creative, and ethical participants in this emerging participatory culture:
  • Play — the capacity to experiment with your surroundings as a form of problem-solvingPerformance — the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discoverySimulation — the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real world processesAppropriation — the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media contentMultitasking — the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.Distributed Cognition — the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacitiesCollective Intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goalJudgment — the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sourcesTransmedia Navigation — the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalitiesNetworking — the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate informationNegotiation — the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.”
  • We need far more knowledge on the development of learning interests and learning pathways over time and space - and their influences.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Complex relations of “informal” and “formal” learning
  • The power of the social: How do learners leverage social networks and affiliative ties? What positionings and accountabilities do they enable that matter for learning? The power of the setting: How do learners exploit the properties of settings to support learning, and how do they navigate the boundaries? The power of imagination: What possible courses of action do learners consider, as they project possible selves, possible achievements, and reflect on the learning they need to get there?
  • We have spent too much time in the dark about these issues that matter for learning experiences and pathways.
  • Jayme Jacobson on 11 Mar 09
     
    This is a great list of core competencies. Should use (cite) in forming the participatory learning strategies.
  • Theron DesRosier on 13 Mar 09
     
    Hey Jayme, Nice list. Another skill you talked about earlier was translation. Where does that fit? Is it a subskill of Negotiation?
Corinna Lo

IJ-SoTL - A Method for Collaboratively Developing and Validating a Rubric - 1 views

academics.georgiasouthern.edu/...index.htm

assessment rubric

shared by Corinna Lo on 16 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Corinna Lo on 16 Apr 10
     
    "Assessing student learning outcomes relative to a valid and reliable standard that is academically-sound and employer-relevant presents a challenge to the scholarship of teaching and learning. In this paper, readers are guided through a method for collaboratively developing and validating a rubric that integrates baseline data collected from academics and professionals. The method addresses two additional goals: (1) to formulate and test a rubric as a teaching and learning protocol for a multi-section course taught by various instructors; and (2) to assure that students' learning outcomes are consistently assessed against the rubric regardless of teacher or section. Steps in the process include formulating the rubric, collecting data, and sequentially analyzing the techniques used to validate the rubric and to insure precision in grading papers in multiple sections of a course."
Gary Brown

71 Presidents Pledge to Improve Their Colleges' Teaching and Learning - Faculty - The C... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...125285

accountability

shared by Gary Brown on 05 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • In a venture known as the Presidents' Alliance for Excellence in Student Learning and Accountability, they have promised to take specific steps to gather more evidence about student learning, to use that evidence to improve instruction, and to give the public more information about the quality of learning on their campuses.
  • The 71 pledges, officially announced on Friday, are essentially a dare to accreditors, parents, and the news media: Come visit in two years, and if we haven't done these things, you can zing us.
  • deepen an ethic of professional stewardship and self-regulation among college leaders
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Beginning in 2011, all first-year students at Westminster will be required to create electronic portfolios that reflect their progress in terms of five campuswide learning goals. And the college will expand the number of seniors who take the Collegiate Learning Assessment, so that the test can be used to help measure the strength of each academic major.
  • "The crucial thing is that all of our learning assessments have been designed and driven by the faculty," says Pamela G. Menke, Miami Dade's associate provost for academic affairs. "The way transformation of learning truly occurs is when faculty members ask the questions, and when they're willing to use what they've found out to make change.
  • Other assessment models might point some things out, but they won't be useful if faculty members don't believe in them."
  • "In the long term, as more people join, I hope that the Web site will provide a resource for the kinds of innovations that seem to be successful," he says. "That process might be difficult. Teaching is an art, not a science. But there is still probably a lot that we can learn from each other."
Gary Brown

It's the Learning, Stupid - Lumina Foundation: Helping People Achieve Their Potential - 3 views

www.luminafoundation.org/...2009-10-14.html

learning accountability

shared by Gary Brown on 15 Oct 09 - Cached
  • My thesis is this. We live in a world where much is changing, quickly. Economic crises, technology, ideological division, and a host of other factors have all had a profound influence on who we are and what we do in higher education. But when all is said and done, it is imperative that we not lose sight of what matters most. To paraphrase the oft-used maxim of the famous political consultant James Carville, it's the learning, stupid.
  • We believe that, to significantly increase higher education attainment rates, three intermediate outcomes must first occur: Higher education must use proven strategies to move students to completion. Quality data must be used to improve student performance and inform policy and decision-making at all levels. The outcomes of student learning must be defined, measured, and aligned with workforce needs. To achieve these outcomes (and thus improve success rates), Lumina has decided to pursue several specific strategies. I'll cite just a few of these many different strategies: We will advocate for the redesign, rebranding and improvement of developmental education. We will explore the development of alternative pathways to degrees and credentials. We will push for smoother systems of transferring credit so students can move more easily between institutions, including from community colleges to bachelor's degree programs.
  • "Lumina defines high-quality credentials as degrees and certificates that have well-defined and transparent learning outcomes which provide clear pathways to further education and employment."
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • And—as Footnote One softly but incessantly reminds us—quality, at its core, must be a measure of what students actually learn and are able to do with the knowledge and skills they gain.
  • and yet we seem reluctant or unable to discuss higher education's true purpose: equipping students for success in life.
  • Research has already shown that higher education institutions vary significantly in the value they add to students in terms of what those students actually learn. Various tools and instruments tell us that some institutions add much more value than others, even when looking at students with similar backgrounds and abilities.
  • The idea with tuning is to take various programs within a specific discipline—chemistry, history, psychology, whatever—and agree on a set of learning outcomes that a degree in the field represents. The goal is not for the various programs to teach exactly the same thing in the same way or even for all of the programs to offer the same courses. Rather, programs can employ whatever techniques they prefer, so long as their students can demonstrate mastery of an agreed-upon body of knowledge and set of skills. To use the musical terminology, the various programs are not expected to play the same notes, but to be "tuned" to the same key.
Gary Brown

Comments on the report - GEVC Report Comments - University College - Washington State U... - 2 views

universitycollege.wsu.edu/...default.aspx

general education

shared by Gary Brown on 23 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • My primary concern rests with the heavy emphasis on "outcomes based" learning. First, I find it difficult to imagine teaching to outcomes as separate from teaching my content -- I do not consider "content" and "outcomes" as discrete entities; rather, they overlap. This overlap may partly be the reason for the thin and somewhat unconvincing literature on "outcomes based learning." I would therefore like to see in this process a thorough and detailed analysis of the literature on "outcomes" vs content-based learning, followed by thoughtful discussion as to whether the need to focus our energies in a different direction is in fact warranted (and for what reasons). Also, perhaps that same literature can provide guidance on how to create an outcomes driven learning environment while maintaining the spirit of the academic (as opposed to technocratically-oriented) enterprise.
  • Outcomes are simply more refined ways of talking about fundamental purposes of education (on the need for positing our purposes in educating undergraduates, see Derek Bok, Our Underachieving Colleges, ch. 3). Without stating our educational purposes clearly, we can't know whether we are achieving them. "
  • I've clicked just about every link on this website. I still have no idea what the empirical basis is for recommending a "learning goals" based approach over other approaches. The references in the GEVC report, which is where I expected to find the relevant studies, were instead all to other reports. So far as I could tell, there were no direct references to peer-reviewed research.
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  • I do not want to read the "three volumes of Pascaralla and Terenzini." Instead, I would appreciate a concise, but thorough, summary of the empirical findings. This would include the sample of institutions studied and how this sample was chosen, the way that student outcomes were measured, and the results.I now understand that many people believe that a "learning goals" approach is desirable, but I still don't understand the empirical basis for their beliefs.
Joshua Yeidel

News: 'You Can't Measure What We Teach' - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/...humanities

assessment accountability

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 27 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 27 Jan 10
     
    "Despite those diverging starting points, the discussion revealed quite a bit more common ground than any of the panelists probably would have predicted. Let's be clear: Where they ended up was hardly a breakthrough on the scale of solving the Middle East puzzle. But there was general agreement among them that: * Any effort to try to measure learning in the humanities through what McCulloch-Lovell deemed "[Margaret] Spellings-type assessment" -- defined as tests or other types of measures that could be easily compared across colleges and neatly sum up many of the learning outcomes one would seek in humanities students -- was doomed to fail, and should. * It might be possible, and could be valuable, for humanists to reach broad agreement on the skills, abilities, and knowledge they might seek to instill in their students, and that agreement on those goals might be a starting point for identifying effective ways to measure how well students have mastered those outcomes. * It is incumbent on humanities professors and academics generally to decide for themselves how to assess whether their students are learning, less to satisfy external calls for accountability than because it is the right thing for academics, as professionals who care about their students, to do. "
  • Joshua Yeidel on 27 Jan 10
     
    Assessment meeting at the accreditors -- driven by expectations of a demand for accountability, with not one mention of improvement.
Joshua Yeidel

Refining the Recipe for a Degree, Ingredient by Ingredient - Government - The Chronicle... - 1 views

chronicle.com/...125545

assessment accreditation outcomes

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 04 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Supporters of the Lumina project say it holds the promise of turning educational assessment from a process that some academics might view as a threat into one that holds a solution, while also creating more-rigorous expectations for student learning. Mr. Jones, the Utah State history-department chairman, recounted in an essay published in the American Historical Association's Perspectives on History how he once blithely told an accreditation team that "historians do not measure their effectiveness in outcomes." But he has changed his mind. The Lumina project, and others, help define what learning is achieved in the process of earning a degree, he said, moving beyond Americans' heavy reliance on the standardized student credit hour as the measure of an education. "The demand for outcomes assessment should be seized as an opportunity for us to actually talk about the habits of mind our discipline needs to instill in our students," Mr. Jones wrote. "It will do us a world of good, and it will save us from the spreadsheets of bureaucrats."
  • Joshua Yeidel on 04 Jan 11
     
    Lumina Foundation pushes a Eurpopean-style process to define education goals state- and nation-wide, with mixed success. "Chemistry, history, math, and physics have been among the most successful", whileothers have had a hard time beginning. "Supporters of the Lumina project say it holds the promise of turning educational assessment from a process that some academics might view as a threat into one that holds a solution, while also creating more-rigorous expectations for student learning. Mr. Jones, the Utah State history-department chairman, recounted in an essay published in the American Historical Association's Perspectives on History how he once blithely told an accreditation team that "historians do not measure their effectiveness in outcomes." But he has changed his mind. The Lumina project, and others, help define what learning is achieved in the process of earning a degree, he said, moving beyond Americans' heavy reliance on the standardized student credit hour as the measure of an education. "The demand for outcomes assessment should be seized as an opportunity for us to actually talk about the habits of mind our discipline needs to instill in our students," Mr. Jones wrote. "It will do us a world of good, and it will save us from the spreadsheets of bureaucrats."
Nils Peterson

Assess this!: Assessment of learning is more complicated than it is (?) - 0 views

assessory.blogspot.com/...sment-of-learning-is-more.html

shared by Nils Peterson on 18 Feb 10 - Cached
  • "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....
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 18 Feb 10
       
      see Gary's oft-repeated comment about assessment is part of T&L. Also note the tension Ewell mentions
Nils Peterson

AAC&U News | April 2010 | Feature - 1 views

www.aacu.org/...feature.cfm

shared by Nils Peterson on 01 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Comparing Rubric Assessments to Standardized Tests
  • First, the university, a public institution of about 40,000 students in Ohio, needed to comply with the Voluntary System of Accountability (VSA), which requires that state institutions provide data about graduation rates, tuition, student characteristics, and student learning outcomes, among other measures, in the consistent format developed by its two sponsoring organizations, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), and the Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU).
  • And finally, UC was accepted in 2008 as a member of the fifth cohort of the Inter/National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research, a collaborative body with the goal of advancing knowledge about the effect of electronic portfolio use on student learning outcomes.  
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • outcomes required of all UC students—including critical thinking, knowledge integration, social responsibility, and effective communication
  • “The wonderful thing about this approach is that full-time faculty across the university  are gathering data about how their  students are doing, and since they’ll be teaching their courses in the future, they’re really invested in rubric assessment—they really care,” Escoe says. In one case, the capstone survey data revealed that students weren’t doing as well as expected in writing, and faculty from that program adjusted their pedagogy to include more writing assignments and writing assessments throughout the program, not just at the capstone level. As the university prepares to switch from a quarter system to semester system in two years, faculty members are using the capstone survey data to assist their course redesigns, Escoe says.
  • the university planned a “dual pilot” study examining the applicability of electronic portfolio assessment of writing and critical thinking alongside the Collegiate Learning Assessment,
  • The rubrics the UC team used were slightly modified versions of those developed by AAC&U’s Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education (VALUE) project. 
  • In the critical thinking rubric assessment, for example, faculty evaluated student proposals for experiential honors projects that they could potentially complete in upcoming years.  The faculty assessors were trained and their rubric assessments “normed” to ensure that interrater reliability was suitably high.
  • “We found no statistically significant correlation between the CLA scores and the portfolio scores,”
  • There were many factors that may have contributed to the lack of correlation, she says, including the fact that the CLA is timed, while the rubric assignments are not; and that the rubric scores were diagnostic and included specific feedback, while the CLA awarded points “in a black box”:
  • faculty members may have had exceptionally high expectations of their honors students and assessed the e-portfolios with those high expectations in mind—leading to results that would not correlate to a computer-scored test. 
  • “The CLA provides scores at the institutional level. It doesn’t give me a picture of how I can affect those specific students’ learning. So that’s where rubric assessment comes in—you can use it to look at data that’s compiled over time.”
  • Their portfolios are now more like real learning portfolios, not just a few artifacts, and we want to look at them as they go into their third and fourth years to see what they can tell us about students’ whole program of study.”  Hall and Robles are also looking into the possibility of forming relationships with other schools from NCEPR to exchange student e-portfolios and do a larger study on the value of rubric assessment of student learning.
  • “We’re really trying to stress that assessment is pedagogy,”
  • “It’s not some nitpicky, onerous administrative add-on. It’s what we do as we teach our courses, and it really helps close that assessment loop.”
  • In the end, Escoe says, the two assessments are both useful, but for different things. The CLA can provide broad institutional data that satisfies VSA requirements, while rubric-based assessment provides better information to facilitate continuous program improvement.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 01 Apr 10
       
      CLA did not provide information for continuous program improvement -- we've heard this argument before
  • Gary Brown on 01 Apr 10
     
    The lack of correlation might be rephrased--there appears to be no corrlation between what is useful for faculty who teach and what is useful for the VSA. A corollary question: Of what use is the VSA?
Nils Peterson

CITE Journal -- Volume 2, Issue 4 - 0 views

www.citejournal.org/...article3.cfm

shared by Nils Peterson on 13 Aug 10 - Cached
  • The ability to aggregate data for assessment is counted as a plus for CS and a minus for GT
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 13 Aug 10
       
      This analysis preceeds the Harvesting concept.
  • The map includes the portfolio's ability to aid learners in planning, setting goals, and navigating the artifacts learners create and collect.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 13 Aug 10
       
      Recently, when I have been thinking about program assessment I've been thinking how students might assess courses (before adding the couse to their transcript (aka portfolio) in terms of the student's learning needs for developing proficiency in the 6 WSU goals. Students might also do a course evaluation relative to the 6 goals to give instrutors and fellow students guideposts. SO, the notion here, portfolio as map, would be that the portfolio had a way for the learner to track/map progress toward a goal. Perhaps a series of radar charts associated with a series of artifacts. Learner reflection would lead to conclusion about what aspect of the rubric needed more practice in the creation of the next artifacts going into the portfolio.
Joshua Yeidel

University World News - US: America can learn from Bologna process - 0 views

www.universityworldnews.com/article.php

Bologna higher_education

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 22 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 22 Sep 10
     
    Lumina proposes that the US "adapt and apply the lessons learned from the Bologna Process in the EU, which has developed methodologies that "uniquely focus on linking student learning and the outcomes of higher education" -- tautological though that sounds.
  • Joshua Yeidel on 22 Sep 10
     
    Apparently the "audacious" discussion in the WCET webinar yesterday (to be linked) featuring Ellen Wagner and Peter Smith is old hat in Europe. A national "degree framework" is almost inconceivable in the US, but 'tuning' -- "faculty-led approach that involves seeking input from students, recent graduates and employers to establish criterion-referenced learning outcomes and competencies" -- sounds a lot like in goal-setting.
Gary Brown

The Future of Wannabe U. - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 2 views

chronicle.com/...124917

outcomes numbers

shared by Gary Brown on 18 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Alice didn't tell me about the topics of her research; instead she listed the number of articles she had written, where they had been submitted and accepted, the reputation of the journals, the data sets she was constructing, and how many articles she could milk from each data set.
  • colleges and universities have transformed themselves from participants in an audit culture to accomplices in an accountability regime.
  • higher education has inaugurated an accountability regime—a politics of surveillance, control, and market management that disguises itself as value-neutral and scientific administration.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • annabe administrator noted that the recipient had published well more than 100 articles. He never said why those articles mattered.
  • And all we have are numbers about teaching. And we don't know what the difference is between a [summary measure of] 7.3 and a 7.7 or an 8.2 and an 8.5."
  • The problem is that such numbers have no meaning. They cannot indicate the quality of a student's education.
  • or can the many metrics that commonly appear in academic (strategic) plans, like student credit hours per full-time-equivalent faculty member, or the percentage of classes with more than 50 students. Those productivity measures (for they are indeed productivity measures) might as well apply to the assembly-line workers who fabricate the proverbial widget, for one cannot tell what the metrics have to do with the supposed purpose of institutions of higher education—to create and transmit knowledge. That includes leading students to the possibility of a fuller life and an appreciation of the world around them and expanding their horizons.
  • But, like the fitness club's expensive cardio machines, a significant increase in faculty research, in the quality of student experiences (including learning), in the institution's service to its state, or in its standing among its peers may cost more than a university can afford to invest or would even dream of paying.
  • Such metrics are a speedup of the academic assembly line, not an intensification or improvement of student learning. Indeed, sometimes a boost in some measures, like an increase in the number of first-year students participating in "living and learning communities," may even detract from what students learn. (Wan U.'s pre-pharmacy living-and-learning community is so competitive that students keep track of one another's grades more than they help one another study. Last year one student turned off her roommate's alarm clock so that she would miss an exam and thus no longer compete for admission to the School of Pharmacy.)
  • Even metrics intended to indicate what students may have learned seem to have more to do with controlling faculty members than with gauging education. Take student-outcomes assessments, meant to be evaluations of whether courses have achieved their goals. They search for fault where earlier researchers would not have dreamed to look. When parents in the 1950s asked why Johnny couldn't read, teachers may have responded that it was Johnny's fault; they had prepared detailed lesson plans. Today student-outcomes assessment does not even try to discover whether Johnny attended class; instead it produces metrics about outcomes without considering Johnny's input.
  • Gary Brown on 18 Oct 10
     
    A good one to wrestle with.  It may be worth formulating distinctions we hold, and steering accordingly.
Gary Brown

Assess this! - 5 views

assessory.blogspot.com

assessment ;

shared by Gary Brown on 16 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Assess this! is a gathering place for information and resources about new and better ways to promote learning in higher education, with a special focus on high-impact educational practices, student engagement, general or liberal education, and assessment of learning.
  • If you'd like to help make Assess this! more useful, there are some things you can do. You can comment on a post by clicking on the comments link following the post.
  • Of the various ways to assess student learning outcomes, many faculty members prefer what are called “authentic” approaches that document student performance during or at the end of a course or program of study. In this paper, assessment experts Trudy Banta, Merilee Griffin, Teresa Flateby, and Susan Kahn describe the development of several promising authentic assessment approaches.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Going PublicDouglas C. Bennett, President of Earlham College, suggests each institution having a public learning audit document and gives the example of what this means for Earlham College as a way for public accountability.
  • More TransparencyMartha Kanter, from the US Education Department, calls for more transparency in the way higher education does accreditation.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Nine Principles of Good Practice for Assessing Student Learning
  • Gary Brown on 16 Feb 10
     
    A very interesting useful site where we might help ourselves by getting involved.
Gary Brown

Learning to Hate Learning Objectives - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher E... - 1 views

chronicle.com/...49399

shared by Gary Brown on 16 Dec 09 - Cached
  • Perhaps learning objectives make sense for most courses outside the humanities, but for me—as, no doubt, for many others—they bear absolutely no connection to anything that happens in the classroom.
    • Gary Brown
      Gary Brown on 16 Dec 09
       
      The homeopathic fallacy, debunked by volumes of research...
  • The problem is, this kind of teaching does not correlate with the assumption of my local accreditation body, which sees teaching—as perhaps it is, in many disciplines—as passing on a body of knowledge and skills to a particular audience.
    • Gary Brown
      Gary Brown on 16 Dec 09
       
      A profoundly dangerous misperception of accreditation and its role.
  • We talked about the ways in which the study of literature can help to develop and nurture observation, analysis, empathy, and self-reflection, all of which are essential for the practice of psychotherapy,
    • Gary Brown
      Gary Brown on 16 Dec 09
       
      Reasonable outcomes, with a bit of educational imagination and an understanding of assessment obviously underdeveloped.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • They will not achieve any "goals or outcomes." Indeed, they will not have "achieved" anything, except, perhaps, to doubt the value of terms like "achievement" when applied to reading literature.
    • Gary Brown
      Gary Brown on 16 Dec 09
       
      good outcome
  • To describe this as a learning objective is demeaning and reductive to all concerned.
    • Gary Brown
      Gary Brown on 16 Dec 09
       
      Only in the sense Ralph Tyler criticized, and he is the one who coined the term and developed the concept.
  • except to observe certain habits of mind, nuances of thinking, an appreciation for subtleties and ambiguities of argument, and an appreciation of the capacity for empathy, as well as the need, on certain occasions, to resist this capacity. There is no reason for anyone to take the course except a need to understand more about the consciousness of others, including nonhuman animals.
Gary Brown

Can We Promote Experimentation and Innovation in Learning as well as Accountability? In... - 0 views

www.academiccommons.org/...value-project-rhodes-interview

shared by Gary Brown on 18 Mar 09 - Cached
  • Theron DesRosier on 18 Mar 09
     
    he VALUE project comes into the middle of this tension, as it proposes to create frameworks (or metarubrics) that provide flexible criteria for making valid judgments about student work that might result from a wide range of assessments and learning opportunities, over time. In this interview, Terrel Rhodes, Director of the VALUE project and Vice President of the Association for American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) describes the assumptions and goals behind the Project. He especially addresses how electronic portfolios serve those goals as the locus of evaluation by educators, providing frameworks for judgments tailored to local contexts but calibrated to "Essential Learning Outcomes," with broad significance for student achievement. The aims and ambitions of the VALUE Project have the potential to move us further down the road toward a more systematic engagement with the expansion of learning. -Randy Bass
  • Gary Brown on 18 Mar 09
     
    This paragraph is the one with the most interesting set of assumptions. There are implications about "validity" Bass notes earlier and the role of numbers as "less robust" rather than, say, an interesting and important ingredient in that conversation. Mostly though I see the designation that the rubrics are "too broad to be useful" as a flag that these are not really rubrics, but, well, flags...
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