A Comprehensive Approach to Assessment of High-Impact Practices, co-released with the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA), outlines a process of effectively assessing high-impact practices at your institution. High-impact practices, such as learning communities, capstones, undergraduate research, and community-based experiences, are effective pedagogies. Most of these practices have been around for decades. The vast majority of campuses can proudly point to multiple high-impact practices happening somewhere within their institutions. Given the intense focus across institutions of higher education on identifying, tagging, and touting their high-impact practices, assessment is what separates the committed practitioners from the casual adopters.

The newest publication in a series of reports on the AAC&U Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education (VALUE) Initiative—​We Have a Rubric for That: The VALUE Approach to Assessment—compiles ten years of evidence to provide an argument-based framework for the assessment of student learning in higher education using the VALUE rubrics. This publication presents a wide range of sources to provide timely evidence of the power of the VALUE approach to assessment.

Global education, or global learning, is not about national borders—it is about sharing problems, knowing that many challenges ultimately affect everyone because of the interconnectedness of today’s world citizens. Models of Global Learning provides a descriptive analysis of the global learning projects at twenty-four institutions that were part of the AAC&U Shared Futures Project, General Education for a Global Century. In the publication, the authors describe the overall results and patterns that emerged during this study, several exemplary practices, and their concluding thoughts and insights. This report contributes to the qualitative research that provides a synopsis of major trends, discussions, and themes that emerge from efforts to support global learning in academic institutions.

Download a free copy

Rising to the LEAP Challenge provides a series of case studies that reflect the "real-world" application of students' cumulative learning through signature work projects, as put forth in AAC&U's LEAP Challenge. Such projects focus on complex questions that are meaningful to individual students and to society; require students to integrate, apply, demonstrate, reflect on, and communicate their cumulative learning; and require input from multiple disciplines and perspectives. Colleges and universities can best prepare students to accomplish signature work through guided-pathway curricula and cocurricular experiences in which students can develop and connect their knowledge and skills across broad and specialized study, over time. The thirteen case studies included in Rising to the LEAP Challenge demonstrate the variety of forms signature work can take, as well as the variety of institutional contexts and curricular pathways that can effectively support it. The...