VALUE-Plus: Rising to the Challenge

With funding from the Fund for the Improvement of PostSecondary Education (FiPSE), AAC&U, in collaboration with the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU), and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) engaged in a substantial national project to advance our understanding around assessment student learning outcomes. The collaboration across these organizations led to resource development efforts for the proposed initiative, the building of campus leadership and capacity to implement student learning outcome assessment, and the use of new comparable templates and frameworks to more effectively use assessment results on campuses.

For its part of the project, AAC&U lead the effort to develop a broad set of rubrics and an e-portfolio framework for assessing a wider array of learning outcomes than those measured by existing national tests. This part of the project foregrounded practices that base assessments on authentic examples of student work collected over time in an e-portfolio. Titled Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education (VALUE), this work resulted in the collection and synthesis of best practices in faculty-developed rubrics to highlight commonalities of outcomes and expectations of achievement levels across institutions. AAC&U has also developed models and templates through which e-portfolios can be used to demonstrate, share, and assess student accomplishment of advanced and integrative learning outcomes.

Project Goals

Recognizing the need to take student learning to a higher and more useful level that would enhance acceptance and sustainability on campuses, we worked together to launch a broad-based effort to:

• Engage our member presidents and top administrators in adopting, supporting, and advancing institutionally, practices that strengthen student learning assessment and achievement;
• Provide needed information – organized in comparable templates – about student progress and accomplishments to the public and stakeholders;
• Provide validated information about student learning outcomes in an easily accessible and transparent form, making responsible use of existing measures that have already been developed for critical thinking and communication skills;
• Provide new models for assessing learning outcomes that are widely considered essential, but for which good assessment metrics are not yet available;
• Provide valid and reliable curriculum-linked measures that will be of use to and accepted by faculty and administrators on campuses for guiding enhanced curricular, pedagogical, and programmatic improvements.
• Work with a subset of our members to provide both exemplars of learning-centered designs for assessment and constituent feedback to the initiative.

More information is also available from the press release for the project.

This project is supported by the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education.