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Nils Peterson

Shifting Faculty Roles for New Learning Environments « Center for Teaching, L... - 0 views

wsuctlt.wordpress.com/...-for-new-learning-environments

aacu learning_community new model

shared by Nils Peterson on 31 Mar 09 - Cached
  • Nils Peterson on 31 Mar 09
     
    This is the packet for AAC&U. Comments welcome, changes hard to implement at this late hour.
  • Nils Peterson on 31 Mar 09
     
    Materials for the AAC&U Conf April 2-4, 2009. The last link is to a new Theron-inspired JamyeJ graphic.
Theron DesRosier

Engaging Departments: Assessing Student Learning, Peer Review single issue - 1 views

secure.aacu.org/...index.cfm

AAC&U assessment program_evaluation learning_outcomes

shared by Theron DesRosier on 26 Aug 10 - No Cached
  • Theron DesRosier on 26 Aug 10
     
    "Description This issue explores how departments are developing assessment approaches that deepen student learning. Recognizing that most faculty identify strongly with their discipline and that students are engaged in more complex and sophisticated practice of liberal learning as they complete their majors, the issue presents articles that advance integrative and engaged learning in and across disciplines. The features draw on sessions and presentations from AAC&U's 2009 Engaging Departments Institute. " A pdf download is available on this page.
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?
Gary Brown

Views: The White Noise of Accountability - Inside Higher Ed - 2 views

www.insidehighered.com/...adelman

accountability

shared by Gary Brown on 06 Aug 10 - Cached
  • We don’t really know what we are saying
  • “In education, accountability usually means holding colleges accountable for the learning outcomes produced.” One hopes Burck Smith, whose paper containing this sentence was delivered at an American Enterprise Institute conference last November, held a firm tongue-in-cheek with the core phrase.
  • Our adventure through these questions is designed as a prodding to all who use the term to tell us what they are talking about before they otherwise simply echo the white noise.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • when our students attend three or four schools, the subject of these sentences is considerably weakened in terms of what happens to those students.
  • Who or what is one accountable to?
  • For what?
  • Why that particular “what” -- and not another “what”?
  • To what extent is the relationship reciprocal? Are there rewards and/or sanctions inherent in the relationship? How continuous is the relationship?
  • In the Socratic moral universe, one is simultaneously witness and judge. The Greek syneidesis (“conscience” and “consciousness”) means to know something with, so to know oneself with oneself becomes an obligation of institutions and systems -- to themselves.
  • Obligation becomes self-reflexive.
  • There are no external authorities here. We offer, we accept, we provide evidence, we judge. There is nothing wrong with this: it is indispensable, reflective self-knowledge. And provided we judge without excuses, we hold to this Socratic moral framework. As Peter Ewell has noted, the information produced under this rubric, particularly in the matter of student learning, is “part of our accountability to ourselves.”
  • But is this “accountability” as the rhetoric of higher education uses the white noise -- or something else?
  • in response to shrill calls for “accountability,” U.S. higher education has placed all its eggs in the Socratic basket, but in a way that leaves the basket half-empty. It functions as the witness, providing enormous amounts of information, but does not judge that information.
  • Every single “best practice” cited by Aldeman and Carey is subject to measurement: labor market histories of graduates, ratios of resource commitment to various student outcomes, proportion of students in learning communities or taking capstone courses, publicly-posted NSSE results, undergraduate research participation, space utilization rates, licensing income, faculty patents, volume of non-institutional visitors to art exhibits, etc. etc. There’s nothing wrong with any of these, but they all wind up as measurements, each at a different concentric circle of putatively engaged acceptees of a unilateral contract to provide evidence. By the time one plows through Aldeman and Carey’s banquet, one is measuring everything that moves -- and even some things that don’t.
  • Sorry, but basic capacity facts mean that consumers cannot vote with their feet in higher education.
  • If we glossed the Socratic notion on provision-of-information, the purpose is self-improvement, not comparison. The market approach to accountability implicitly seeks to beat Socrates by holding that I cannot serve as both witness and judge of my own actions unless the behavior of others is also on the table. The self shrinks: others define the reference points. “Accountability” is about comparison and competition, and an institution’s obligations are only to collect and make public those metrics that allow comparison and competition. As for who judges the competition, we have a range of amorphous publics and imagined authorities.
  • There are no formal agreements here: this is not a contract, it is not a warranty, it is not a regulatory relationship. It isn’t even an issue of becoming a Socratic self-witness and judge. It is, instead, a case in which one set of parties, concentrated in places of power, asks another set of parties, diffuse and diverse, “to disclose more and more about academic results,” with the second set of parties responding in their own terms and formulations. The environment itself determines behavior.
  • Ewell is right about the rules of the information game in this environment: when the provider is the institution, it will shape information “to look as good as possible, regardless of the underlying performance.”
  • U.S. News & World Report’s rankings
  • The messengers become self-appointed arbiters of performance, establishing themselves as the second party to which institutions and aggregates of institutions become “accountable.” Can we honestly say that the implicit obligation of feeding these arbiters constitutes “accountability”?
  • But if the issue is student learning, there is nothing wrong with -- and a good deal to be said for -- posting public examples of comprehensive examinations, summative projects, capstone course papers, etc. within the information environment, and doing so irrespective of anyone requesting such evidence of the distribution of knowledge and skills. Yes, institutions will pick what makes them look good, but if the public products resemble AAC&U’s “Our Students’ Best Work” project, they set off peer pressure for self-improvement and very concrete disclosure. The other prominent media messengers simply don’t engage in constructive communication of this type.
  • Ironically, a “market” in the loudest voices, the flashiest media productions, and the weightiest panels of glitterati has emerged to declare judgment on institutional performance in an age when student behavior has diluted the very notion of an “institution” of higher education. The best we can say is that this environment casts nothing but fog over the specific relationships, responsibilities, and obligations that should be inherent in something we call “accountability.” Perhaps it is about time that we defined these components and their interactions with persuasive clarity. I hope that this essay will invite readers to do so.
  • Clifford Adelman is senior associate at the Institute for Higher Education Policy. The analysis and opinions expressed in this essay are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent the positions or opinions of the institute, nor should any such representation be inferred.
  • Gary Brown on 06 Aug 10
     
    Perhaps the most important piece I've read recently. Yes must be our answer to Adelman's last challenge: It is time for us to disseminate what and why we do what we do.
Theron DesRosier

Envisioning the Post-LMS Era: The Open Learning Network (EDUCAUSE Quarterly) | EDUCAUSE - 3 views

www.educause.edu/...199389

assessment AAC&U learning_outcomes

shared by Theron DesRosier on 30 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Theron DesRosier on 30 Aug 10
     
    A featured article in Educause Quarterly contains this quote: "The importance of authentic, web-enabled learner assessment is clearly behind Caulfield's notion of "loosely coupled assessment" (first coined in a blog post by Mike Caulfield July 31, 2007) and WSU's harvesting gradebook project, with which we claim shared intellectual roots."
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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