AAC&U News | February 2004

Innovations at LaGuardia Community College Help Students Integrate Their Learning

AAC&U’s 2002 report, Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College, argues that a quality twenty-first century college education will help students become “intentional learners”—“integrative thinkers who can see connections in seemingly disparate information and draw on a wide range of knowledge to make decisions.” The report argues that these students, armed with more sophisticated integrative skills, will be better equipped to succeed in today’s complex world.

LaGuardia Community College, a campus of the City University of New York (CUNY), is seeking to advance this goal of integrative learning through the use of electronic portfolios to cumulatively assess student learning and through a new first-year learning communities program. Launched in 2002, LaGuardia’s ePortfolio project enables students to reflect on their learning as they collect their work in digital portfolios. This spring, new First Year Academies will significantly expand the scope of the project by incorporating ePortfolios in designated clusters of first-year courses. Designed to help students overcome the sense of fragmentation often associated with the first year of college, the First Year Academies emphasize the connections between courses and between curricular and co-curricular activities.

In recognition of its progress in developing such programs, LaGuardia Community College was selected in 2003 to participate in Integrative Learning: Opportunities to Connect, a nationwide initiative that grew out of Greater Expectations and is sponsored by AAC&U and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Learning.

Integrating the First Year Experience

An urban community college located in the nation’s most diverse census district, LaGuardia faces special challenges as it seeks to promote integrative learning. More than two-thirds of LaGuardia’s students are immigrants, more than three-quarters are people of color, and more than 90 percent fail one or more of CUNY’s Basic Skills exams in Reading, Writing, and Mathematics upon entering the college. Recent surveys also indicate that many first-year students find courses in basic skills unrelated to their majors, and that many others feel they are not receiving adequate information about career development. Adding to the feeling of fragmentation is the fact that students commute to the school from across the New York metropolitan area.

LaGuardia has actively sought to address these problems since the mid-1980s, when it first developed interdisciplinary learning communities as a way of strengthening connections between courses and improving student involvement in campus life. As it pilots two First Year Academies this semester, the school is undertaking its most ambitious first-year program to date. Students who opt to participate in these academies, which are currently being offered for majors in Technology and Business disciplines, take an introductory course in the discipline and a career development seminar in conjunction with specialized Basic Skills courses, a weekly ePortfolio lab, and co-curricular activities such as orientation events and career nights. “We are trying to create a complete first year package,” explains Paul Arcario, LaGuardia’s Dean of Academic Affairs. “We wanted to find a way of contextualizing the Basic Skills within the disciplines. . . . Now, for example, instead of a general English course that is the same for all students, we can offer specialized English courses tailored to students in different disciplines.”

One example of such a course is Elizabeth Clark’s Basic Writing class, which is offered in this semester’s First Year Business Academy. Professor Clark’s class, entitled “You Are What You Buy: Consumerism and Identity in American Culture,” has been developed over months of consultation with Business Professor James Giordano. Although the class is designed to help students pass their Basic Skills exam in Writing, it is also meant to complement Professor Giordano’s Introduction to Business class and to deepen students’ understanding of their discipline; similarly, Professor Giordano has added writing assignments to his syllabus that make explicit the relevance of writing to business. For such linked courses to succeed, as Professor Clark argues, they must be viewed by students as equally relevant and mutually illuminating: “Integrative learning depends on the fact that one course shouldn’t end up being a service course to the other. Both courses should be in conversation, and offer different ways of thinking about the same subject matter.”

With a Health/Science Academy and a Liberal Arts Academy planned for next year, the benefits of such linked first year coursework will soon be available to students from all majors. The biggest long-term challenge that remains for the First Year Academies, as Dean Paul Arcario acknowledges, is logistical: offering Academy courses to all of LaGuardia’s 5,000 first-year students presents enormous problems of scheduling and coordination. Nonetheless, faculty and administrators are planning a full rollout of the Academies over the next two years.

Using ePortfolios for College-Wide Assessment

Another challenge for LaGuardia is assessing the impact of its recent curricular innovations. In developing a plan to assess the outcome of integrative learning programs, LaGuardia has identified seven interdisciplinary “core competencies” to be promoted and reinforced throughout every student’s academic career: written communication, critical reading, critical thinking, quantitative reasoning, oral communication, research and information literacy, and technological literacy. Faculty at LaGuardia currently are developing rubrics for assessing these core competencies, and eventually, the school plans to evaluate each student’s progress based on work collected in the electronic portfolios. These ePortfolios, which will contain samples of student work from First Year Academy courses as well as from a required Urban Studies course and at least one senior-level or capstone course, will enable faculty to track a student’s progress from enrollment to graduation.

The format of the ePortfolios allows students to present selections of their work, to incorporate design elements, and to add personal reflections on their learning. Such individualized touches can make assessment difficult, but they also create new opportunities—unlike standardized exams, the portfolios offer highly individualized portraits of student learning. Administrators hope that the resulting picture will be more nuanced than that which emerges from other data sources. “We know our students make a tremendous amount of progress,” Dean Arcario says. “With ePortfolios, we will be able to document their growth in new ways.”

EPortfolios, of course, benefit the students as well. By showcasing their work and demonstrating their technical proficiency, the portfolios can help students when they transfer to four-year colleges or apply for jobs. They also allow students to bring their learning back to their families and communities. Many LaGuardia students are the first in their families to attend college, and Paul Arcario sees this fact as one reason for the popularity of ePortfolios during the pilot phase: “It’s a way of showing their family what they’re doing at college,” he explains. Students so far are excited about sharing their experiences with others, and that, Dean Arcario hopes, is a very good sign for the future of LaGuardia’s integrative learning programs.

For more information about First Year Academies and other linked courses at LaGuardia, visit the school’s Learning Communities Web site. For more about the use of electronic student portfolios, visit the ePortfolio site. LaGuardia Community College is online at www.lagcc.cuny.edu.

More information about Integrative Learning: Opportunities to Connect is available on AAC&U’s Web site. The entire Greater Expectations report is available at www.greaterexpectations.org. To read more about learning communities and their development and assessment across the country, see the special issue of Peer Review from Fall, 2001.