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.

Faculty Leadership for Integrative Liberal Learning

Faculty Leadership for Integrative Liberal Learning

By: Ann Ferren and David Paris

How can faculty prepare students to integrate their learning and apply it to complex challenges in life, career, and citizenship? This publication presents principles and practices for integrative learning that reflect a holistic concept of undergraduate education that is focused on student empowerment and self-development; intentionally integrated learning opportunities and experiences; and greater clarity and transparency of learning outcomes for students, faculty, and other stakeholders.

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The Quality of a College Degree

The Quality of a College Degree: Toward New Frameworks, Evidence, and Interventions

By: Debra Humphreys, Judith A. Ramaley and Heather McCambly

This publication examines the alignment (and misalignment) between assessment approaches recommended by public policymakers and those undertaken at the campus level, especially in the context of student transfer from two-year to four-year institutions. The authors provide recommendations for reframing policy debates, along with a framework for aligning state and institutional policies with a contemporary vision of educational quality and current patterns of student attendance.  

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Assessment That Works: A National Call, A Twenty-First-Century Response

Assessment That Works: A National Call, A Twenty-First-Century Response

By: Peggy Maki

AAC&U’s Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education (VALUE) initiative is at the center of a national movement to change the way we envision and approach the assessment of student learning gains and accomplishments in college. This publication contextualizes the movement, presents several illuminating case studies of VALUE in action, and exhorts us to maintain the momentum.

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General Education Transformed: How We Can, Why We Must

General Education Transformed: How We Can, Why We Must

By: Paul L. Gaston

A resource for general education reform and curriculum committees, this publication makes a case for re-envisioning general education with clear, purposeful pathways that allow all students to demonstrate their learning through high-impact practices and teaching strategies that are transferable across disciplines, departments, institutions, and even state systems. The author defines student success in terms of both college completion and achievement of essential learning outcomes.

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Civic Prompts: Making Civic Learning Routine across the Disciplines

Civic Prompts: Making Civic Learning Routine across the Disciplines

By: Caryn McTighe Musil

Designed to help build faculty capacity to incorporate civic learning in major courses and programs, this publication provides a process, or set of prompts, faculty can use to define and explore the public purposes and civic inquiries embedded in their disciplines. Ideal for faculty development initiatives, teaching and learning centers, and anyone interested in providing faculty with the tools to embrace and implement effective civic learning.

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Committing to Equity and Inclusive Excellence: A Campus Guide for Self-Study and Planning

Committing to Equity and Inclusive Excellence: A Campus Guide for Self-Study and Planning

Focused on issues of access and success, this publication provides a framework for dialogue, assessment, and action to address inequities in higher education institutions. It offers practical guidance for campus leaders and practitioners who come together across divisions and departments to engage in internal assessment and to chart a path forward for improving student achievement—particularly for students from groups traditionally underserved by higher education.

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Step Up & Lead for Equity: What Higher Education Can Do to Reverse Our Deepening Divides

Step Up and Lead for Equity: What Higher Education Can Do to Reverse Our Deepening Divides

America’s persistent gaps in education, income, and wealth are widening, and the fastest-growing segments of our population are the least likely to have the opportunities they need to succeed. Higher education must focus more urgently on equity, bringing what is known about closing achievement gaps together with what is known about advancing high-quality student learning outcomes. This publication builds the case for challenging the status quo and for making the most empowering forms of college learning available to all students.

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America's Unmet Promise: The Imperative for Equity in Higher Education

America’s Unmet Promise: The Imperative for Equity in Higher Education

By: Keith Witham, Lindsey E. Malcom-Piqueux, Alicia C. Dowd and Estela Mara Bensimon

Responding to the urgent need to expand educational access and success for students from traditionally underserved groups, this publication presents an equity-minded framework that can be used throughout higher education. The authors offer a set of principles for evaluating equity and advancing institutional change, with a specific focus on improving outcomes for students affected by stratification in educational opportunity by race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status.

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General Education Maps and Markers: Designing Meaningful Pathways to Student Achievement

General Education Maps and Markers: Designing Meaningful Pathways to Student Achievement

A resource for faculty members, academic leaders, and policymakers, this publication provides clear principles and guidelines for ensuring that general education fosters essential learning outcomes and key proficiencies important for long-term success and flourishing; that it enriches student learning in the major; and that it prepares students to tackle the kinds of complex problems they will inevitably confront in work, civil society, and their own lives.

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The VALUE Breakthrough: Getting the Assessment of Student Learning in College Right

The VALUE Breakthrough: Getting the Assessment of Student Learning in College Right

By: Daniel F. Sullivan

Focused on assignments produced for a degree program, rather than on answers on time-limited standardized tests, AAC&U’s Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education (VALUE) initiative represents a national movement to change the way assessment is envisioned and approached. This publication explains the importance of this movement and how VALUE relates to the aims of liberal education, to the capabilities employers seek and reward, and to the public policy pressures facing higher education.

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