Press Release

Contacts:
Debra Humphreys, AAC&U, 202-387-3760
Humphreys@aacu.org
Paul F. Hassen, NASULGC, 202-478-6073
PHassen@nasulgc.org
Susan Chilcott, AASCU, 202-293-7070
chilcotts@aascu.org

Association of American Colleges and Universities Awarded $2.4 million Grant from Department of Education to Lead Collaborative Project on Student Learning Assessment

“Rising to the Challenge” To Bring Together Three Leading National Associations—AAC&U, AASCU, and NASULGC—To Take Outcomes Assessment to a New Level and Advance Practices That Strengthen Assessment and Achievement

Washington, DC—September 28, 2007—The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) was awarded a grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) to support an initiative on student learning assessment.

Rising to the Challenge: Meaningful Assessment of Student Learning establishes a consortium between AAC&U and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) and the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASULGC) to collectively build campus leadership and capacity to implement meaningful student learning assessment approaches and use assessment results to improve levels of student achievement. The effort will be led by AAC&U Vice President for Quality, Curriculum and Assessment Terrel Rhodes, with NASULGC Vice President for Academic Affairs David Shulenburger and AASCU Director of Special Projects and Development John Hammang rounding out the leadership team. AAC&U, AASCU, and NASULGC collectively comprise more than 1360 distinct member institutions (public/private, large/small, 2- and 4-year, liberal arts/comprehensive/research).

“AAC&U is very pleased to partner with AASCU and NASULGC on this initiative that will take assessment to a new level on campuses across the country,” said AAC&U President Carol Geary Schneider. “The project seeks to go beyond the goal of providing more information to prospective students and their parents. It is designed to test and advance practices that will provide more meaningful information about student learning outcomes—information that goes beyond basic skills and that can be used to raise levels of student achievement on the full range of learning outcomes important in today’s world.”

The project responds to the need to examine the multiple purposes of learning assessment and to test the validity, comparability, and appropriate uses of a variety of assessment approaches. It builds on the existing learning outcomes framework provided by AAC&U’s Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) initiative, the AASCU/NASULGC Voluntary System of AccountabilitySM (VSA) project, and AASCU’s American Democracy Project.
"AASCU is pleased to be a partner in this comprehensive effort to assess undergraduate student learning and especially to further our work in assessing student competence in skills related to the workplace and civic engagement,” said AASCU President Constantine W. (Deno) Curris. “With the support of this grant, the VSA initiative will serve as a significant step in the evolution of student outcomes assessment, and our involvement underscores the long-standing commitment to accountability and transparency by our nation’s state colleges and universities."

“Completion of this initiative will enable us to better understand the significance of and relationship between various measures of learning outcomes that may eventually be incorporated into the VSA,” said NASULGC President Peter McPherson. “Through this project, the consortium partners hope to significantly advance the science involved in the measurement of learning outcomes.”

The joint initiative will support three main strands of work:

• NASULGC will coordinate efforts by educational researchers and leaders from the Educational Testing Service (ETS), the Council for Aid to Education (CAE), and the American College Testing Program, Inc. (ACT) to examine the extent to which disparate measurement tools recommended as part of the VSA can be used interchangeably, whether these tools are measuring similar or dissimilar outcomes or levels of achievement, and the role test format (e.g. multiple choice vs. open-ended/constructed response measures) plays in the correlation among measures.
• 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 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. AAC&U’s VALUE project was first launched earlier this year with support from the State Farm Companies Foundation.
• AASCU will lead a third part of the initiative to develop a validated survey instrument to measure changes in student growth especially related to the development of competence in skills effective in the workplace and those related to civic engagement.

Rising to the Challenge brings together three leading national higher education associations around a complementary set of shared commitments to generate more information, but also to raise the level of student achievement. It seeks to help campuses use effective tools that provide meaningful information about how well students are learning essential learning outcomes important for work and life in a complex and rapidly changing world.

The Association of American Colleges and Universities is the leading national association concerned with the quality, vitality, and public standing of undergraduate liberal education. Its members are committed to extending the advantages of a liberal education to all students, regardless of academic specialization or intended career. Founded in 1915, AAC&U now comprises more than 1,100 accredited public and private colleges and universities of every type and size.  AAC&U functions as a catalyst and facilitator, forging links among presidents, administrators, and faculty members who are engaged in institutional and curricular planning. Its mission is to reinforce the collective commitment to liberal education at both the national and local levels and to help individual institutions keep the quality of student learning at the core of their work as they evolve to meet new economic and social challenges.

The more than 430 members of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) work to extend higher education to all citizens, including those who have been traditionally underrepresented on college campuses. By Delivering America’s Promise, these institutions fulfill the expectations of a public university by working for the public good through education and engagement, thereby improving the lives of people in their community, their region and their state.

Founded in 1887, the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASULGC, A Public University Association), is an association of public research universities, land-grant institutions and many state public university systems. Its 216 members enroll more than 3.6 million students, award approximately a half-million degrees annually, and have an estimated 20 million alumni. As the nation’s oldest higher education association, NASULGC is dedicated to excellence in learning, discovery and engagement. For more information, visit www.nasulgc.org.