Greater Expectations for Student Transfer

Greater Expectations for Student Transfer: Toward a National Dialogue on State-level Curricular Coherence was an important part of the Greater Expectations vision to define and provide leadership for undergraduate education in the new century. Through a grant from FIPSE, AAC&U worked with the state university systems of Georgia, Maryland, and Utah to:

• identify the educational purposes of their pre-existing statewide requirements;
• specify learning outcomes implicit in the requirements;
• make the purposes clear to all faculty members teaching courses that meet those requirements.

Moving beyond this stage, the three states began to examine how to explain those intentions to students and what assessment strategies can best determine whether the stated purposes are being achieved.

Sixteen additional states sent representatives to a conference in Atlanta (February 2001), for initial discussions related to the creation of purposeful and coherent statewide education requirements. Representatives of a total of 23 states participated in meetings focused on related topics. State legislators also y joined these discussions in efforts to improve mutual understanding of goals, particularly those related to credit transfer.

In 2005, AAC&U published General Education and Student Transfer, a series of essays from the project participants that chronicle their efforts.

This project was sponsored in part by the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE), U.S. Department of Education.

For more information contact Gretchen Sauvey at sauvey@aacu.org.