VALUE: Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education

Overview

As part of AAC&U’s Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) initiative, the VALUE project seeks to contribute to the national dialogue on assessment of college student learning. It builds on a philosophy of learning assessment that privileges multiple expert judgments of the quality of student work over reliance on standardized tests administered to samples of students outside of their required courses. The assessment approaches that VALUE advances are based on the shared understanding of faculty and academic professionals on campuses from across the country.

VALUE assumes that:

• to achieve a high-quality education for all students, valid assessment
  data are needed to guide planning, teaching, and improvement;
• colleges and universities seek to foster and assess numerous essential
  learning outcomes beyond those addressed by currently available
  standardized tests;
• learning develops over time and should become more complex and
  sophisticated as students move through their curricular and cocurricular
  educational pathways toward a degree;
• good practice in assessment requires multiple assessments, over time;
  well-planned electronic portfolios provide opportunities to collect data
  from multiple assessments across a broad range of learning outcomes
  while guiding student learning and building self-assessment capabilities;
• e-portfolios and assessment of work in them can inform programs and
  institutions on progress in achieving expected goals.

Project Activities

With support from the State Farm Companies Foundation, and the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, in the initial phase of the VALUE project, AAC&U:

1. Formed a national advisory board, including key researchers, members of the National Leadership Council, and campus leaders knowledgeable about the research and evidence on student achievement of key learning outcomes and best practices currently utilized on campuses to achieve and measure student progress.
2. Conducted, in concert with the advisory board, a process to articulate for most of the essential learning outcomes the shared expectations for student performance. Achievement and assessment of these outcomes is demonstrated in the context of the required college curriculum, and includes models for e-portfolios and rubrics describing ascending levels of accomplishment (basic, proficient, advanced, etc.).
3. Created, in dialogue with both campuses and the advisory committee, a proposed framework and guide for defining and assessing essential learning outcomes that can be applied to diverse institutions and adapted to a variety of academic and professional fields.

VALUE is AAC&U's effort as part of the larger project Rising to the Challenge which 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.

More information about the project is also available from the press release.