Core Commitments: Educating Students for Personal and Social Responsibility

Call for Proposals - Frequently Asked Questions

The following is a collection of the most frequently asked questions regarding the Call for Proposals. If you have additional questions or concerns, please contact Michele Leaman at leaman@aacu.org or 202-387-3760 x429.

Eligibility
Q. Can campuses outside of the U.S. apply?
Q. Is AAC&U membership required in order to apply?

Budget
Q. May campuses use in-kind funds as part of the $25,000 matching funds?
Q. May campuses include indirect costs as part of the budget?
Q. Where will the meetings be located?
Q. How specific does the budget need to be? Can broad categories be used?

Team Members
Q. Who would qualify as a “senior administrator”?
Q. May the teams consist of less than seven members? More than seven members?
Q. If a member of our team has an unavoidable conflict with on of the meeting dates, may we send someone in his/her place?
Q. Can students serve as team members?

Institutional Inventory
Q. Is this an assessment that will measure whether or not students are meeting these objectives?
Q. What does the Personal and Social Responsibility Institutional Inventory entail?
Q. How will the data from the campus inventories be used or disseminated?
Q. What costs will be associated with administering the inventory?
Q. What is the format of the inventory?
Q. May we see some sample questions?
Q. Can non-participating campuses obtain a copy of the Inventory?
Q. How are the sample sizes determined for each constituent group?

Eligibility

Q. Can campuses outside of the U.S. apply?
A. Campuses accredited by a U.S. accrediting body may apply, including campuses located outside of the United States.

Q. Is AAC&U membership required in order to apply?
A. No, but AAC&U members are given preference when two applications are equally strong.

Budget

Q. May campuses use in-kind funds as part of the $25,000 matching funds?
A. Yes.

Q. May campuses include indirect costs as part of the budget?
A. No. As standard policy, AAC&U does not pay indirect costs. This restriction applies to budgets developed for Core Commitments: Educating Students for Personal and Social Responsibility.

Q. Where will the meetings be located?
A. The location of the meetings have not been finalized. We will select locations based on a set of criteria that includes consideration of cost and transportation.

Q. How specific does the budget need to be? Can broad categories be used?
A. Your budget should reflect your current assessment of the institutional strategies you think will leverage the greatest progress in educating students for personal and social responsibility across the curriculum and co-curriculum.

Whatever budget allocations you make (e.g., direct funds, “buying out” a person’s time, etc.) should help the project staff understand how your institution will be supporting the activities outlined under “responsibilities of participant campuses” in the Call for Proposals, such as administering the Institutional Inventory and holding campus dialogues. Beyond these activities, you might consider things such as mini-grants, cross-collaboration grants, faculty and staff summer workshops, constituent-based planning and professional development opportunities during the school year, new initiatives within residence halls, student leadership development courses or programs, investments in assessment, and so on.

In consultation with project staff, a team may make changes to their budget as the project unfolds if they decide it would be appropriate to allocate resources differently.

Team Members

Q. Who would qualify as a “senior administrator”?
A. AAC&U does not make any assumptions about position titles, organizational structures, or hierarchies on individual campuses. We do, however, expect campuses to develop teams that are led by individuals in academic affairs and student affairs that participate in institution-wide decision making processes or otherwise have institutional level influence. Generally, it is important to select team members who have credibility with their peers, access to key constituent groups, and significant vested interest in this project. Ideally, the team’s sphere of influence to enhance education for personal and social responsibility would span multiple levels and settings across the institution.

Q. May the teams consist of less than seven members? More than seven members?
A. Teams must consist of at least seven members. More than seven members are allowed, although AAC&U will not provide any additional resources to cover their participation, and campuses will be expected to cover all travel costs associated with additional team members.

We urge campuses to consider developing “two-tiered” teams in order to expand project participation on campus. In addition to the project team, having what functions as a “home team” can expand your advocates for the project.

Q. If a member of our team has an unavoidable conflict with one of the meeting dates, may we send someone in his/her place?
A. Yes. Think strategically about who would be the best substitute so your team continues to have as much impact as possible across campus. It will also be critical to bring absent team members “up to speed” about what happened at a meeting and how the experience influenced your institution’s efforts.

Q. Can students serve as team members?
A. Yes, but campuses should recognize that this is a two-and-a-half year project and should therefore incorporate a student who can serve for the life of the project.

You might decide that student input into the project is just as effectively garnered by creatively engaging groups of students—particularly students who are not regularly tapped for such activities—throughout the process.

Again, using the notion of ever-widening circles of engagement as a model, the designated project team members function as a leadership core, but to effect institution-wide change, it is wise to use that team to engage a rich and diverse group of people in enhancing education for individual and social responsibility over time.

Institutional Inventory

Q. Is this an assessment that will measure whether or not students are meeting these objectives?
A. The Personal and Social Responsibility Institutional Inventory is not an assessment. This instrument will help institutions understand how and where the five dimensions of social and personal responsibility are embedded across the institution.

The inventory is designed principally to serve as a catalyst for conversations—conversations that will help shape what needs to happen, and where, to foster deeper learning about personal and social responsibility among students. It might inspire a campus to create different ways to assess student learning in these areas or to evaluate programmatic efforts, but it will not itself serve in this capacity.

Q. What does the Personal and Social Responsibility Institutional Inventory entail?
A. The Inventory consists of four versions of a survey, designed for four campus constituent groups—students, faculty, student affairs staff, and academic administrators. These surveys will be accessible through a Web site provided by AAC&U and taken electronically by samples of each group. The surveys will be submitted anonymously, though demographic data is included.

Q. How will the data from the campus inventories be used or disseminated?
A. The data will be analyzed initially by a University of Michigan survey research team that has been contracted by the project. Individual institutional data will then be returned to the respective campuses for use in dialogues and to spark further assessment and evaluation.

The project staff retain the right to analyze and report on Inventory data. Any reporting on the data by project staff (e.g., in project meeting presentations, in reports to the foundation, in project newsletters) will be done so that neither data nor the analyses will be associated with individual institutions. Generally, data will be reported in the aggregate across the leadership consortium, though it may also be disaggregated by constituent group, institutional type, or other factors such as gender.

Q. What costs will be associated with administering the inventory?
A. Each campus will need to determine what mechanisms are needed to ensure adequate sampling and completion rates and then project associated costs. For example, a campus may decide to use some of its project funds to pay for the time it will take for an institutional research staff member (or someone else versed in survey research methods) to determine representative sample sizes for the four constituent groups, to devise strategies to encourage people to complete the surveys, to arrange for ways for people to actually take the survey, and possibly to analyze data in-house.

Q. What is the format of the inventory?
A. Each survey consists of basic background information, a series of questions with Likert-scale answers, and a few open-ended questions for which respondents submit short answers. Each survey will take less than 25 minutes to complete.

Q. May we see some sample questions?
A. We will not have the Inventory available for distribution before the December 15 application deadline, but it will be available to all participants at the first project meeting in March. At that time, the teams will be able to provide feedback on the Inventory before it is finalized for use by the Consortium in the fall of 2007.

Q. Can non-participating campuses obtain a copy of the Inventory?
A. Not yet. By the end of the project, the Inventory will have been refined through piloting and then by use by the Consortium, and so we will happily make it available to the broader field.

Q. How are the sample sizes determined for each constituent group?
A. We will work with individual institutions in the Leadership Consortium to determine appropriate sample sizes for each constituent group.