VALUE-Plus: Rising to the Challenge

The Association of American Colleges and Universities, the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU), and the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges (NASULGC) are engaged in a substantial national project on assessing student learning outcomes. We will not only collaborate on the resource development effort for the proposed initiative, but will work together to build campus leadership and capacity to implement student learning outcome assessment and to put the results to effective use through a set of new comparable templates and frameworks.

For its part of the project, AAC&U will lead an effort to develop an e-portfolio framework for assessing a wider array of learning outcomes than those measured by these other tests. This part of the project will foreground 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 research and development effort will collect and synthesize best practices in faculty-developed rubrics to highlight commonalities of outcomes and expectation of achievement levels across institutions. AAC&U also will develop 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 will have acceptance and sustainability on campuses, we are working 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.

Project Activities

To achieve these goals, the three organizations are working together, along with our member institutions, leading assessment experts, and other organizations, on four important aspects of assessing student learning to:

• Provide campus-based leadership – institutional and academic – for assessing student learning and using the results to improve student achievement
• Support widespread use of new common templates for reporting information
• Provide technical documentation and information to campuses
• Develop new resources and models for assessing learning outcomes that reflect the multiple aims of a college education.

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.