Students in the all-women undergraduate program at Bay Path University often talk about the “sisterhood” and the supportive environment fostered by their instructors, administrators, and each other.
Bay Path, a private university in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, has a long history of... Read More
In the summer of 2014, representatives from ten Minnesota institutions came together with a singular purpose: to build and strengthen a culture of assessment on their campuses.
These campuses formed the Minnesota Collaborative as an offshoot of the... Read More
At many colleges and universities, the introduction of a new assessment project is met with something less than enthusiasm by faculty. At St. Cloud State University in Minnesota, however, university involvement in the Multi-State Collaborative to Advance Learning Outcomes Assessment (MSC)—a... Read More
A positive trend in recent years has been the move by many colleges and universities toward integrated curricula through which students forge connections between general education and the major and develop crucial, cross-cutting capacities progressively from the first to final year of college (... Read More
When Santa Clara University (SCU) began revising its core curriculum in 2005, it identified integrative learning as a crucial element of the university’s identity and mission. It’s not an uncommon learning goal, and many of the requirements SCU has implemented to engage students in integrative... Read More
Building a college from scratch presents a lot of challenges, but it's also "fantastically freeing to be able to start fresh," says Scott Evenbeck, president of Charles and Stella Guttman Community College. Guttman is the newest community college in the City University of New York (CUNY) system... Read More
Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) is less than three miles from the Central Indiana campus of Ivy Tech Community College, Indiana's statewide community college system. The two institutions would seem to be natural partners for transfer, but until 1990 IUPUI did not accept... Read More
In David Hubert's political science class at Salt Lake Community College, students analyze campaign finance data and write papers about recent elections in Utah. In Kati Lewis's composition class, students write papers in different genres—such as a position paper, a review, and a memoir—all on... Read More
Texas A&M University has a pretty simple philosophy when it comes to assessment: Make it useful, make it flexible, and "play with the people who want to play," says Ryan McLawhon, Texas A&M's assistant director of institutional assessment. While this laid-back approach might seem like an... Read More
Richard Robles uses an analogy to illustrate the differences between standardized tests and rubric-based assessments, two important tools currently used to measure student learning outcomes. "Rubric assessments are like thermometers, whereas standardized tests are like litmus tests," Robles... Read More