Publications

AAC&U publications cover a range of topics and provide the latest research, analysis, and valuable starting points for campus practitioner and policy leader dialogues. AAC&U monographs, reports, and guides focus on teaching, learning, curriculum, and academic leadership, and shine a spotlight on promising practices at every kind of college and university. See below for all AAC&U publications.

Paths to Success: How Community Colleges Are Strengthening Guided Pathways to Ensure Students Are Learning

Paths to Success: How Community Colleges Are Strengthening Guided Pathways to Ensure Students Are Learning

Edited by Tia Brown McNair and Lucie Bonneville

In 2019, twenty community colleges joined Strengthening Guided Pathways and Career Success by Ensuring Students Are Learning, a two-year project led by the Association of American Colleges and Universities. The project draws on the guided pathways framework to support institutions as they (1) map academic pathways and degree programs to student goals, (2) help students choose and enter a degree pathway, (3) keep students on their paths, and (4) build institutional capacity to ensure students are learning. Paths to Success: How Community Colleges Are Strengthening Guided Pathways to Ensure Students Are Learning features narratives, best practices, and suggestions from project leaders on the twenty participating campuses.

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Making Liberal Education Inclusive

Making Liberal Education Inclusive: The Roots and Reach of the LEAP Framework for College Learning

By: Carol Geary Schneider

From 2005 to 2018, AAC&U led a national public advocacy and campus-action initiative to champion the importance of a liberal education for individual students and for a nation dependent on economic creativity and democratic vitality. At the heart of the initiative—titled Liberal Education and America’s Promise, or LEAP—was a distinctive framework for college-level learning that includes a set of broad learning outcomes, high-impact educational practices, and authentic forms of assessment. Making Liberal Education Inclusive tells the LEAP story and situates it within the broader context of AAC&U’s work over the two previous decades to break down the dividing lines between a “true” liberal arts education and career-related fields, integrally connect liberal learning with the wider world, and combine liberal education with inclusive excellence and equity.

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We Hold These Truths: Dismantling Racial Hierarchies, Building Equitable Communities

Edited by Tia Brown McNair

We Hold These Truths describes the work of Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation (TRHT) Campus Centers at colleges and universities across the country to dismantle the tools that perpetuate oppression and entrenched racial hierarchies. By creating positive narratives about race, identifying and examining current realities of race relations in communities, pinpointing levers for change, and engaging key individuals, the narratives included in this volume illustrate the power of what can be accomplished when you have a vision for change.

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What Liberal Education Looks Like: What It Is, Who It’s For, and Where It Happens

What Liberal Education Looks Like presents a guiding vision of educational excellence that is grounded in equity and inclusion. In distilling the principles, practices, and contemporary challenges of liberal education, this signature AAC&U publication clearly describes the learning all students need for success in an uncertain future and for addressing the compelling issues we face as a democracy and as a global community—regardless of where they study, what they major in, or what their career goals are.

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Teaching for Liberal Learning in Higher Education

By: Mary Taylor Huber

Conversations about liberal education typically focus broadly on mission, goals, curricula, cocurricular educational opportunities, or overall student outcomes. Conversations about teaching and learning, by contrast, are more granular, focusing on what happens in the classroom, the teaching practices that faculty individually or collectively elect to use, or how a course or learning experience is designed, delivered, assessed, and improved. This ebook brings these discourses together to explore what is known about teaching practices that promote liberal learning in higher education.

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From Equity Talk to Equity Walk: Expanding Practitioner Knowledge for Racial Justice in Higher Education

By: Tia Brown McNair, Estela Mara Bensimon and Lindsey Malcom-Piqueux

Drawing from campus-based research projects sponsored by the AAC&U and the Center for Urban Education at the University of Southern California, From Equity Talk to Equity Walk provides practical guidance on the design and application of campus change strategies for achieving equitable outcomes. The authors offer advice on how to build an equity-minded campus culture, align strategic priorities and institutional missions to advance equity, understand equity-minded data analysis, develop campus strategies for making excellence inclusive, and move from a first-generation equity educator to an equity-minded practitioner. Central concepts and key points are illustrated through campus examples.

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A Comprehensive Approach to Assessment of High-Impact Practices

By: Ashley Finley

High-impact practices—such as learning communities, capstones, undergraduate research, and community-based experiences—are effective pedagogies, and most of these practices have been around for decades. 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. Co-released by the Association of American Colleges and Universities and the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment, A Comprehensive Approach to Assessment of High-Impact Practices outlines a process of effectively assessing high-impact practices.

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Tradition Shaping Change: General Education in the Middle East and North Africa

Tradition Shaping Change: General Education in the Middle East and North Africa

By: Susan Albertine, Maha Al-Hendawi, Abdelhamid Ahmed (eds.)

Surveying the landscape of general education and core curricula in the Middle East and North Africa, contributors focus on the indigenous features and boundary-crossing goals and outcomes of specific programs in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. Tradition Shaping Change illustrates the ways in which colleges and universities in the region are shaping the agenda for higher education at the global level.

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We Have a Rubric for That

We Have a Rubric for That: The VALUE Approach to Assessment

By: Kate McConnell , Terrel Rhodes, Erin M. Horan and Bethany Zimmerman

First introduced in 2009 as an alternative to standardized tests, the VALUE rubrics are now at the center of conversations about the quality of student learning within and across higher education institutions. We Have a Rubric for That reports on the first decade of the Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education (VALUE) Initiative to present compelling evidence of the effectiveness of AAC&U’s signature approach to assessment.

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A Vision for Equity: Results from AAC&U's Project "Committing to Equity and Inclusive Excellence: Campus-Based Strategies for Student Success"

A Vision for Equity

Presenting findings from a three-year project on Committing to Equity and Inclusive Excellence led by AAC&U in partnership with the Center for Urban Education at the University of Southern California, A Vision for Equity shares lessons learned about addressing equity gaps at thirteen participating campuses. This publication details evidence-based interventions focused on improving student success and includes practical examples, models, and resources for identifying and addressing disparities in student outcomes. The project and publication were funded by Strada Education Network and Great Lakes Higher Education Corporation & Affiliates.

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