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Nils Peterson

2009 Annual Meeting | Conference Program - 0 views

  • 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
       
      need to get to these guys with our harvesting gradebook ideas...
    • Nils Peterson
       
      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
       
      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
       
      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.
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  • 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
       
      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
       
      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
       
      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
       
      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
       
      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.
Gary Brown

How Colleges Could Better Prepare Students to Tackle Society's Problems - Students - Th... - 1 views

  • Employers increasingly want to hire students who are highly adaptive, who can work in a fast-paced environment, be creative and problem-solve—and these are not necessarily core skills universities focus on. Most universities focus on knowledge acquisition, but what the world requires is much more about learning how to work within a fast-changing environment and be a leader in that context.
  • social entrepreneurship is relevant in different disciplines
  • We're not just bringing them into the classroom, but we're involving them in more research collaborations and conversations, so the learning students do is guided by that.
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  • I just heard from a faculty member at Cornell who has increased the amount of experiential learning she requires for class projects. More students are asking for it, and she's using every opportunity to get people out in the community or talking to people so they can engage in real-world experience.
  • Maryland has created a Center for Social Value Creation
  • Siloed disciplines are one of our biggest challenges. The world doesn't operate in disciplines—its problems and organizations are cross-cutting. The more interdisciplinary people can think and learn, the more equipped they will be to deal with the complexity of the real world.
Kimberly Green

Would You Like Credit With That Internship? - Students - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

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    Students pay tuition to work for free ... unpaid internships are growing in this down economy, favoring the wealthy who can afford them. But internships are generally valuable for students, administrators say. The complementary courses involve journals, essays, oral presentations, or work portfolios. Independent studies lean toward academics. Companies often see academic credit as substitute compensation that qualifies interns as legally unpaid trainees and keeps them on their colleges' liability insurance. Advertisements specify: "Candidates must be able to receive academic credit." That makes some campus officials bristle. "What they're saying is holding the institution hostage," says Kathy L. Sims, director of career services at the University of California at Los Angeles. Employers don't know colleges' academic standards, she says. "It's really not their call whether their experience is creditworthy." Colleges have dealt with that quandary in various ways. Some, especially those with traditions of experiential learning, vet and monitor internships, enrolling students in courses designed to complement their real-world work. Others let professors sponsor independent studies based on internships. More and more have devised some form of noncredit recognition to try to satisfy employers without altering academic philosophies or making students pay tuition to work free. At Bates College, the game is up. "We're quite adamant about our refusal to play along," says James W. Hughes, a professor of economics. As chairman of the department eight years ago, he got dozens of calls from students, parents, and employers asking for credit for unpaid internships, mainly in the financial industry. "Why is it that we have to evaluate this experience," he says, "just so some multibillion-dollar bank can avoid paying $7.50 an hour?" But the law is vague, and arguably antiquated. In the for-profit sector, guidelines for legally unpaid internships come from a 1947 U
Nils Peterson

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

  • 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.  
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  • 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
       
      CLA did not provide information for continuous program improvement -- we've heard this argument before
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    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?
Kimberly Green

Constant Curricular Change - 1 views

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    Faculty members routinely change their courses from semester to semester, experimenting with both minor changes and major innovations, according to a national survey released Saturday by the Association of American Colleges and Universities. But while professors see curricular innovation as part of their jobs, they remain uncertain about whether pedagogical efforts are appropriately rewarded, the study found. The survey -- of faculty members at all ranks at 20 four-year colleges and universities, including both public and private institutions -- found that 86.6 percent make some revision to courses at least once a year. Revisions could be relatively minor, with changes in the syllabus, readings or assignments qualifying. But about 37 percent reported adopting a significant new pedagogy in at least one of their courses at least once a year -- with new pedagogies being defined as such approaches as experiential learning, service learning and learning communities. Only 3 percent of faculty members surveyed said that they never or "almost never" make changes in the courses they teach from year to year.
Gary Brown

Faith in Prior Learning Was Well Placed - Letters to the Editor - The Chronicle of High... - 1 views

  • The recognition that a college that offered credit for experiential learning could stand with traditional institutions, while commonplace today, was a leap of faith then. Empire State had to demonstrate its validity through results—educational outcomes—and on that score, it stood tall. In fact, focusing on outcomes, as we did, led many of us to question how well traditional institutions would measure up!
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    an important question.
Nils Peterson

NCIIA - 0 views

shared by Nils Peterson on 13 Nov 08 - Cached
  • The NCIIA works with colleges and universities to build collaborative experiential learning programs that help nurture a new generation of innovators and entrepreneurs with strong technical and business skills and the tools and intention to make the world a better place.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      Another attempt to bring authentic problems in community to the univeristy curriculum
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