Teagle Grant Planning Meeting
Emory Conference Center, June 29-30, 2006
Participants:
Agnes Scott College:
James Diedrick
Laura Palucki Blake
Karen Anthony
Converse College:
Jeffrey Barker
UNC-Asheville:
Lisa Friedenberg
Wofford College:
Dennis Wiseman
Dan Maultsby Steven Zides
Ellen Goldey
June 29, 2006
Welcome from Jim Diedrick, Associate Dean of the College, Agnes Scott College
Diedrick welcomed the participants to Atlanta and the Emory Conference Center. He noted that while he had used several phrases to describe this meeting—“mini-summit,” “planning conference,” Teagle retreat,” it also deserves to be called a celebration. It is an occasion to celebrate the awarding of the three-year Teagle Foundation grant, and of the good creative work that led to this award—especially Ellen Goldey’s original vision, articulated more than a year ago. Diedrick emphasized that among the many benefits the grant will bring the consortium, it will provide the resources and incentives to engage faculty in the kind of direct assessment of student learning that will improve our courses and our curricula. It the grant succeeds in developing or in some cases enriching the culture of assessment on our individual campuses, it will have a lasting impact.
I. Details, Housekeeping—1:45-2:30 p.m.
A. Budget
P. Blake: Details in the enclosed budget and schedules are not set, but are rather a springboard for our retreat discussion.
Diedrick: Anticipating no one institution will need total allocated amount in a given year, leaving financial wiggle room. 3-year budget gives flexibility. Each institution gets $10K to spend on faculty development, which can be used for assessment and should be spent by June each year. Only constraint: moneys should always be used for assessment related to first-year integrative experiences.
Goldey: This will provide a way to pay faculty $100 a day to participate in summer workshops, assessment seminars, etc.
P. Blake: Most of money is in faculty development and Post-Doc. Funds may be shifted between institutions.
Goldey: We should consider matching funds (each institution contributing to travel money) for Post-Doc travel and lodging expenses, et cetera.
Diedrick: The budget includes considerable money for travel and expenses.
P. Blake: For reporting purposes (reports due to Teagle in August of each year), it will be helpful if members use the same categories to report budgets at each institution, to facilitate reporting to Teagle. Also, important to provide quarterly budget reports.
Wiseman: Wofford does monthly budgeting.
P. Blake: Monthly would be even better.
Diedrick: First aggregate annual report to Teagle due August 27, 2007. Best to turn in individual reports to Agnes Scott by July 31st of same year, since as stewards of the budget we will be accountable for moneys spent.
P. Blake: Schedule of retreat locations organized alphabetically; these can be changed..
Diedrick: Note: we submitted this budget to the ASC VP of Finance for review.
P. Blake: First check from Teagle Foundation received July 1 and members may nowdraw funds.
Diedrick: We could generate checks for institutions or work on reimbursement system.
Goldey: Central control of funds is advisable; let’s work on reimbursement system..
Maultsby: I’m comfortable with that. We can make quarterly requests.
P. Blake: I’ll set up a common request form and put it up on internal Teagle Website.
B. Hiring of Post-Doc Research Associate
P. Blake: Job description written in early June, and sent to an assessment website and also to U of KY, GA Tech, GA State. Also posted on the Employment Opportunities section of the ASC web site. Part-time requirement: 18 hours a week. Salary $20K, with COLA each year.
Importance to us: someone who can build relational databases, run statistical analyses, get up to speed on liberal arts education and the characters of our individual institutions.
Diedrick: Parallel projects have found Post-Doc useful in grant applications.
P. Blake: Individual could be based anywhere.
Goldey: ATL would be good base.
P. Blake: Two applicants so far: one is Post-Doc, one is B.A. research assoc. at higher education data sharing group.
Goldey: Important to get survey results and share them among group.
P. Blake: Jim and I have written a memo of understanding for our group, so that members feel comfortable sharing confidential data.
Goldey: It is important that we make the Research Associate candidates aware of travel requirement; this person should be able and willing to visit each of our campuses.
P. Blake: What would you ask of a Post-Doc? For me, the ability to communicate complex data is crucial, to do it transparently.
Goldey: To whom can the candidates report at individual campuses?
P. Blake: With respective institutional research offices.
Maultsby: Wofford doesn’t have a functional IR office.
Goldey: Candidate can serve as an external evaluator of individual projects.
P. Blake: Ability to function independently, think on feet is important.
Barker: Someone who knows which questions are the best to ask.
P. Blake: Hopefully someone who comes from larger research-based institution but has undergraduate liberal education background. Individual who works best with us. Anyone in group welcome to review applicants along with me. Will set up a Teagle Website on ASC Website.
C. Timeline, Annual Meeting Schedule
P. Blake: Teagle usually holds listenings in September. It’s logical for us to set up meetings after these meeting.
Wiseman, Goldey: Have attended. Teagle identifies voices in audience that grant writers need to hear. We attended Listening during the time that Teagle was setting up this very program.
Diedrick: I have been invited by Bob Connor to a listening September 7-10 2006. Connor suggested reading Derek Bok’s book, Our Underachieving Colleges (Princeton UP, 2005), about crisis in undergraduate education. Focus: key “value-added” initiatives that have shown traction.
Goldey, Maultsby:: October will be a difficult time for the consortium to meet
Fall Break periods: Converse: 16-17 October
ASC: 19-22 October
UNC-A: 9-10 October Wofford: 13 October
SACS at Wofford: 25-26 September
D. Reporting
P. Blake: Attending assessment conferences is a tacit responsibility of participating in Teagle Grant. It would be good to talk about how this grant was used in the re-accreditation process by each member institution.
II. Discussion of Individual Projects
Diedrick: We would like to move around the table and ask each team to discuss their individual projects, and speak to any modifications made since we submitted the grant proposal back in March..
P. Blake: At ASC we are interested in our First Year Seminar program, and our piloting of Living and Learning Communities attached to several of the FYS—3 in 2005-2006, and six in 2006-2007. Last year we piloted living and learning communities. We hired an intern to do matching. There are six total, 3 in fall, 3 in spring.
Diedrick: Unlike many colleges, ASC has an FYS program spread out over the year. Faculty are resistant to scheduling FYS in fall alone, but this can change.
Diedrick: Consultant money can be useful if you need someone to help tip the faculty in favor of program initiatives. Eric Newhall helped convince many ASC faculty that the living and learning communities is a worthwhile pilot.
P. Blake: First Year Seminars are universal at ASC—required of all students.. They’re also writing intensive courses, which pair well with English 110, a course most freshman students take.
Zides: What percentage of faculty teaches in the program?
Diedrick: About 25 percent teach within the program each year. About 80 percent have participated from the inception of the program.
P. Blake: Faculty take writing seriously, and that was the linchpin for faculty participation. They spend time talking about how to convey ideas through writing..
Goldey: What kind of oversight or training do faculty receive before participating, before teaching one of these courses?
P. Blake: The faculty that are going to teach in the coming year get together in May, right after commencement. They hold a two-day workshop, talking about syllabus structure, an extremely informal exchange. I would have liked to see more focus and direction in laying out goals. This year the group and the director agreed to undertake learning outcomes assessment in the FYS, focusing on writing—specifically, thesis development. I’m not concerned about process in the courses so much as goals. I want them to look at student work. We’re weak on assessment. I want faculty to have the experience of reading papers from FYS other than their own. We devised the idea of portfolio analysis. Each faculty member is going to gather two papers from his/her course, one from the beginning and one from the end. I want to get them together and read papers blind to look for theses, to establish writing rubrics. I will sit and read with them.
Diedrick: In Teagle language: what are the differences in writing gains between students in living and learning communities and those who aren’t? There’s clearly collaborative learning going on in the communities.
P. Blake: In the focus interviews Jim and I conducted with our students who completed an FYS (some of whom were also in LLCs, some of whom were not), students and professors not in communities were resistant to showing work and receiving advice.
P. Blake: Development money will help motivate faculty to participate. I see this is a one-shot leading to a deeper question. I’m interested in having faculty come up with questions and modify courses to coincide with goals of the program.
Goldey: What about combining resources and having writing mini-conferences between the universities?
Friedenberg: We run a colloquium in May for the coming fall, but no one ever takes a look on whether it has an effect on the teaching of writing workshops.
Maultsby: It would be good to have faculty join together for mutual benefit.
Goldey: We have resources at all four institutions that we should share. In-house experts could choose the best from each institution.
Friedenberg: We have a lot of interest in differential effect across disciplines. In our colloquium, instructors adopt their students as advisees for two years. I would be interested in seeing effect of writing across the curriculum.
Diedrick: As long as we can integrate the writing with each of the first year programs, we stay within the spirit of Teagle.
Barker: Converse is going to begin their first year program in fall ’07 as part of a new FYS requirement.
Diedrick: Do we want to continue around the table?
Barker: We began with a focus that was on service learning internship and service engagement. Next year we will have two things going on: the Julia Jones Daniel Center, a collaboration between student affairs and the academic program, to overcome their rivalry. There are specific assessment questions, relating for instance to student satisfaction. We note that student satisfaction is not directly related to academic program. I’d like an assessment in the second year. The other side is related to general education, and that’s the service incentive. Logistics are difficult, but one way to distribute it is to have honors students do it in the spring.
P. Blake: A good question is whether honors students need the service component as much as others.
Friedenberg: In case students fail, you need to have your academic policies in line.
Barker: Can we assess the real impact of these first year seminars on general education? We do not see a bi-modal distribution of losses. We don’t see people being driven out both at the bottom and the top, just at the lower end.
P. Blake: In the first year to put students in a service learning experience might be a hook that keeps them involved.
Barker: One of the unique things we have is a very strong positive relationship with community agencies.
Zides: What kind of training do these professors get to integrate service with academics?
Barker: That’s part of what I would like to assess this coming year.
Diedrick: The relationship of FYS to general education can guide your spending; you can spend money figuring out how to train faculty to do assessment, who later incorporate that training with the service learning initiative.
Goldey: What Wofford has in the proposal is to assess our learning communities program, but we will likely shift focus to the stand-alone Humanities 101 requirement, taught by faculty from all the humanities. It is required and has to take place in the first semester. Those seminars have 15 students apiece.
Maultsby: When we first started the course, the faculty member served as adviser to the students. Eventually folks who were not teaching FYS were not advisers. We uncoupled advising from teaching of the seminars because it was an unfair burden to those faculty.
Goldey: We also have the Novel Experience. All freshmen read a novel by a contemporary living author, who comes to address the students. Beforehand, students meet with faculty to discuss the novel and later write an essay about the novel. Faculty choose the best essays and bind them, and when the author comes to address the students, he or she responds to the essays, and students become stars academically. The essay isn’t graded, so it’s low risk with high payoff. I see this as a resource to look at students beyond their ability to write a thesis, to look at their thinking. We also focus on technology use, so we try to establish an electronic writing portfolio for students, and the NE essay can be part of that. There is resistance, however, from faculty who see the writing portfolio as an assessment of them and not of the students.
P. Blake: I explain the e-portfolio as an academic MySpace. Students are familiar with that and it’s non-confrontational for faculty.
Goldey: I’m interested in looking at measures of cognitive development. I see these NE essays as being a piece that we can send out to readers to get an idea of where are students are in terms of cognitive development.
Friedenberg: There are other spins to this. You can look at Perry’s Model of Social and Ethical Thinking. You’re looking for applied cognitive skills.
Diedrick: Teagle understands how difficult it is to measure creativity at this level.
Goldey: Readers will train your faculty to read the essays. I want to know more than whether students can write a good thesis. I want to understand their thinking level.
Diedrick: Each of us can use a different model of teaching and assessing writing and compare the findings.
P. Blake: I want the faculty looking at assessment whether it’s thesis writing or not. I want to open faculty eyes to the fact that a grade is not the end of assessment. Let’s go back and look for critical thinking. Let’s go back multiple times in a similar set of assignments and look for skills you want the first-year students to have.
Wiseman: The NE is the only baseline question that we examine all students on.
P. Blake: You can get the students to tell you about their growth.
Wiseman: You have to teach the faculty to teach for writing.
Goldey: The e-portfolio allows students to assess their progress in writing. Advisers can use it as a tool to set the tone for advising, to allow them to understand the advisee.
Diedrick: We’re moving toward requiring students to write a reflective essay about choice of major at the time they officially declare their major.
P. Blake: It allows students and advisers see what students have factored into their decision.
Goldey: Assessment data can be very political and divisive between learning communities and faculty, and stand-alone courses. Another question is whether learning communities are sustainable financially.
Diedrick: You could use Teagle money as a carrot. You can offer money for people to plan learning communities for the following year.
P. Blake: It seems that there’s a lot of communication among members of learning communities, but are the skeptics being brought into the circle?
Goldey: One problem is that a lot of data is anecdotal.
Diedrick: My question is what actual assessment you’ve done between learning communities and stand-alone courses and how you can measure cognitive gains among the students. My question is, three years later when they take the CLA, how did those students (who said they were happy with learning communities) do compared to students who were in stand-alone courses? That’s the Teagle question.
Zides: I got one student who wanted to take a science course because it was part of a learning community, even if she couldn’t get credit for it in her major.
Goldey: I’d like to assess our faculty growth and faculty development in response to the integrative learning process. You’re just not the same after you work that closely with a colleague.
Friedenberg: We are two years into our new integrative curriculum: Liberal Studies Introductory Colloquia. I have a handout on goals for the LSIC to show you tomorrow. It’s set up with basic intellectual goals and then there are personal development goals that we have couched as advising goals. We just ran our third faculty development, which included introduction to colloquium itself, embedded assessment, all really anecdotal stuff. We also do a section of “What is a Freshman?” It’s neurological, cognitive, Elkind, Piaget, socio-cultural. It’s very well received among the faculty because they haven’t had any personal contact with freshmen. We also have a writing intensive workshop. And we also have an information literacy intensive colloquium. We pay people stipends, we pay people who teach in the faculty development program.
The feedback from the faculty has been useful in re-focusing what we do in the big LSIC colloquium. We put our students into the colloquia, but they give us their top five choices. So far now we’re in the third iteration. We’ve probably taken one-third of the faculty go through training for teaching an LSIC. We expect repeaters but we expect every other year to bring new people in. For Teagle there are three things we’d like to look at, first, efficacy of faculty development program beyond faculty satisfaction. Also, we want to focus on expanding certain kinds of experiences that will target our critical thinking, problem solving and communication goals in the LSIC colloquia. We’d like to train faculty to be better able to use engaging and integrated learning experiences in their teaching. We want to look at opportunities to expand partnerships between faculty and students to embed these kinds of experiences throughout the college education. We want to do a longitudinal kind of assessment. We can track the students from the first year of the LSIC.
Friday, June 30
P. Blake: Three words to consider regarding member institution projects: they need to be manageable, measurable, meaningful.
III. Discussion of Teagle Grant
P. Blake: Teagle Goals:
1. Develop direct assessment to complement large-scale indirect measures.
2. Engage faculty in the iterative process of using results for program improvement.
3. Coordinate assessment efforts at the course, department and co-curricular level with institutional and strategic planning.
Goldey: At Wofford, we’ll use the Learning Communities and Humanities 101. A direct measure would be a backward look coding our NSSE for LCs. With writing portfolios, Novel Experience advanced writing components.
Zides: Could you ask students to write about the same novel at the end of the semester to measure progress?
Goldey: I don’t know if the faculty would go for it.
Wiseman: Or you could change the style of the assignment or the work it’s about.
Goldey: In terms of a Teagle piece, the Perry scale would be useful.
P. Blake: How would you engage the faculty?
Goldey: Mostly in the development workshops, and in bi-weekly humanities focus lunches.
Diedrick: And here’s where the Teagle money works as a carrot. We need to frame it for the faculty so we can say that this is important to us and we can use the money in the following year to reward participation.
Friedenberg: At UNC-A we’ve been charged with expanding our involvement in economic development, especially with the regional HUB program. Our strategic goals need to be tied into the region’s economic development plan, and how education ties into that escapes me. We need to connect LSIC with strategic planning, with research and service learning.
Diedrick: So what you’re looking for is direct assessment.
Friedenberg: We’d like to demonstrate that more state institutions need to think this way.
At UNC we can look at active learning as a value-added component of some LSICs by comparing these sections to those LSICs without active learning components. Retention is a problem for us, so that would be something of an assessment. Development is the way we engage faculty.
Barker: At Converse we’d like to use service learning to complement NSSE data about student satisfaction. We’d engage faculty through development workshops to incorporate service learning and workshops to assess service learning. Among the faculty we have three who have done this on their own and we intend to make full use of them.
P. Blake: For ASC, the assessment will be in the FYS writing portfolio analysis. We’ll engage the faculty in the portfolio analysis, without a holistic rubric so that they will think of assessment as a tool for pedagogical change, not accountability.
Goldey: You could end up with disgruntled faculty who feel they’ve learned about a process but painfully.
P. Blake: I’m counting on them taking control of the process. If they say what they want to do, what they want to talk about, that will be success.
Goldey: How did that exercise look?
P. Blake: Our faculty can’t operationalize the goals of FYS yet.
Wiseman: I look for peer benchmarks too.
Friedenberg: I think we have two institutions looking at engagement and two looking at writing.
Diedrick: Often people think that teaching writing is performative. It’s a vehicle for discussion and engagement, a way of thinking and generating ideas, and my goal is getting people across disciplines to realize that.
P. Blake: I know that I’ve met my goal if I create faculty dialogue.
Goldey: So to Teagle you’d take, “We have this number of faculty participating.”
P. Blake: The data is not the endpoint. I want the faculty to say, “Where do we take this next?”
Barker: A lot of the time goals are based on technical need, not outcome.
Goldey: You can ask, “What is the value added in service learning?”
Wiseman: Writing improvement is a skill, but attributes are important, how does this prepare you to be a citizen?
Friedenberg: I have a whole page of assessment here, but it doesn’t answer the question of whether students are better thinkers, better capable, happier being here.
Maultsby: One year won’t mean much. Students may improve in the first year but not necessarily because of the first-year seminar.
Diedrick: Teagle will give us three years so that we can we can look at first-year students as they arrive and continue through some years of their learning experience. In the fall meeting we can talk about bringing in consultants to educate about assessment. We do have in the budget $3,000 a year per school for consultants and money for travel and expenses besides. And by the way, a good article for everyone to read, which is on the Carnegie sites, is “Integrative Learning: Mapping the Terrain,” by Mary Taylor Huber and Pat Hutchings.
P. Blake: A good question is, “What would happen on campus if all these goals were met?”
Wiseman: I’m both pessimistic and hopeful about the reaction of faculty. If data can demonstrate something that everyone can pursue without stretching them too much out of their orbit that would be progress. “Don’t ask me to do things I’m not trained to do.”
Goldey: How do we demonstrate for Teagle that this is happening? X number of focus groups, we met bi-weekly, does that satisfy . . .
Wiseman: There are programs where faculty observe faculty of other disciplines teaching, but there’s no next step to communicate observations and come to conclusions.
P. Blake: It’s more than just compiling information; it’s synthesizing it and making it meaningful.
Maultsby: Ellen created a workshop for us called “Sharing Your Cool Stuff,” to share effective teaching methodologies.
Diedrick: We need to develop a best practices publication that we share at our institutions with new and present faculty. But at the end of the day that’s not a measurement of how things have changed for students.
IV. Existing Assessment Tools (Visiting Guest: Karen Anthony, Manager of Institutional Research, Agnes Scott College)
Diedrick: Let me put in a plug for NSSE, as someone who has worked on grants for ASC. Assessment data can actually help you win a grant. And it’s a huge benefit for institutions to have both freshmen and senior survey data.
Friedenberg: We set up mandatory sophomore surveys and senior surveys, and make registration contingent on students completing them.
P. Blake: There’s wiggle room in the budget to cover national surveys.
Goldey: NSSE has a consortium program with a special rate as well as twenty additional questions for consortium members.
P. Blake: We could put together twenty additional questions by borrowing from other surveys, because valid survey questions are difficult to write. One survey is Your First College Year.
Goldey: I think we’ve agreed that NSSE is the direction we want to go, but we can borrow from other surveys. But YFCY is designed to cover the entire freshman experience. How can we make those more specific questions?
P. Blake: We can use parts of questions. We don’t have to use all of 12, just 12-B, for instance.
Goldey: Do we want to add parenthetical instructions, like “If you are at Agnes Scott, please consider this question in relation to . . . "
Karen Anthony: I think that will throw the students.
P. Blake: Can we agree on one medium to take the survey, paper or web?
All: Web.
P. Blake: Is there a response rate we want to shoot for?
Karen Anthony: Given the sizes of the schools, I’d hate to go for anything less than 50%.
P. Blake: I’d go for 65% at least.
Friedenberg: I think we’ve all decided that we’re going to do NSSE, for freshmen and seniors, three years in a row, on the web.
P. Blake: How do we want to decide what questions we want to pull from CIRP? That may better done at home.
Friedenberg: We need to find out what entry surveys we give at each institution so that we don’t over-survey the students or repeat questions.
Questions for NSSE:
1. Can we have a consortium of four?
2. Would NSSE be interested in facilitating a joint survey with HERI?
Laura will follow up.
Selection of 20 Questions from CIRP to add to NSSE
Friedenberg: It would be good to work on a common end-of-course assessment for each institution to administer at the end of respective focus courses.
V. Preparation for 2006-2007 Meeting at ASC
P. Blake: What should we cover in the meeting?
Friedenberg: I’d like to move on to direct assessment.
P. Blake: Or we could come up with that course evaluation.
Goldey: Do we want to use that time to bring in somebody to a campus and have a focus group meeting?
P. Blake: I like the idea. It would be a good way to bring in faculty stakeholders, too.
Goldey: Or we could plan out the content for those other in-house workshops.
Diedrick: I think assessment is a good subject for the first meeting, because then we go back to our campuses to implement that.
Friedenberg: These are most appropriately focused on shared issues.
P. Blake: So do we want to talk about direct assessment at the meeting, and bring in faculty to educate about direct assessment.
Goldey: Our faculty need to know that they already incorporate direct assessment in their coursework. It’s when you test the final product.
Diedrick: I think if we could get enough accomplished at this retreat, including determinations about consultants to bring to individual campuses to help faculty and program directors do direct assessment, we could meet again in February 2007.
Tentative dates for Spring 2007 Consortium Meeting: Consortium team members to stay at Emory Conference Center with meetings at ASC, February 23-24, 2007.
VI. Next Steps for Each Campus
Friedenberg: Now after these conversations the focus of what UNC-A is doing for Teagle is clear. Also, my concern is not about getting the faculty on board. People know this is part of what we do.
Diedrick: We should take a moment to look at some national meetings that are relevant, so that at least one of us attends some of the most important.
October 8 - 10, 2006: 6th Annual Fall Institute for Academic Deans & Department Chairs, The National Resource Center for the First-Year Experience and Students in Transition, Hilton Head Island, South Carolina http://www.sc.edu/fye/events/fallinstitute/index.html
November 1-3, 2006: 2006 National Symposium on Postsecondary Student Success, Washington, DC http://nces.ed.gov/npec/symposium.asp (Ellen, Dennis, Laura)
January 11-12: HEDS conference, Sante Fe, NM (Laura)
January 17-20, 2007: AAC&U Annual Meeting: The Real Test: Liberal Education and Democracy’s Big Questions in New Orleans, Louisiana http://www.aacu-edu.org/meetings/annualmeeting/index.cfm
March 1–3, 2007: AAC&U General Education and Assessment meeting in Miami, Florida http://www.aacu-edu.org/meetings/generaleducation/index.cfm (Lisa, Jim, Dennis, Jeff)
P. Blake: We all have manageable projects right now and a clear vision of where we are headed at least in year one. We mapped out an assessment schedule for year one, including indirect survey schedules. Where big grants like this frequently go wrong is by launching unmanageable projects.
Diedrick: I might need a little more summary from Jeff about the Converse project.
Barker: We’ve also done outlining of the out years, of years 2 and 3. The service learning component now in place in curriculum will be moved into a center headed by a newly hired leader. We’ll have a faculty workshop preferably in late fall to talk about service learning and discuss assessment. I’d like to set a target for expanding service learning. Where Teagle comes in is to establish direct assessment strategies for when we’re doing first year seminars with a service component. We also need to talk about what service learning is and what it isn’t.
Zides: We’re going to work on Humanities 101 sections and do a pre- and post- evaluation using electronic portfolios. We’d like to get historical NSSE data on students that have participated in learning communities. We’d like to do some data mining.
Goldey: I’d like to give the Perry scheme a go, but I’m not sure it fits exactly with the Novel Experience essay.
Maultsby: I think we don’t want to get too far away from our original goal reported to Teagle, which is evaluating our learning communities, and the importance of the writing element. The first course which all students take that emphasizes writing is the Humanities 101 course.
Diedrick: So two of the Humanities 101 courses in the fall will be part of learning communities.
Goldey: I want to find a direct assessment tool to see whether students who have participated in learning communities think more richly after that experience. From my own experience with integrative science courses, after the experience, those students think of science more richly, not just as something that’s boring.
P. Blake: That begs for direct assessment, not an additional NSSE question. You want to analyze the richness of the students’ writing.
Maultsby: We can always identify sophomores, juniors or seniors who have participated in LC’s and have them write essays and randomly select students who haven’t participated in LC’s, and have them write essays.
Goldey: We have to watch out about the comparison, which could get bogged down in the politics of an institution.
Diedrick: Could I ask about the electronic portfolios? Is that going to be required starting next year?
Maultsby: By sophomore year, students will have to have in their portfolios one reflective essay in their major, one analytic essay and one research paper with citations. As seniors they’ll add three new papers, they’ll add a reflective essay on their experience in college, and one more analytic paper and one more research paper.
Goldey: There will probably be some permissions issues.
P. Blake: Five years from now you’ll be looking at a lot of papers. Set up some policy for how long you’re going to keep data.
Diedrick: On the electronic portfolios, work in collaboration with Student Life and your career center. It becomes a carrot for students because they have something that they can take with them. Students like to use the best work they’ve done as evidence for employers.
VII. Group Work on News Release About Atlanta Retreat
Diedrick: Can we go around and have each of you say what excites you about this grant, so we can begin working on a news release about this final meeting of our planning grant year?
Friedman: This has turned out to be even more valuable than I thought it would be. Assessing these kinds of experiences is not something I have a lot of background in. There are more connections between what we are all doing than I realized from reading about our respective projects. I think we do have a lot of opportunities to teach each other about integrative learning experiences: about what they are but also how they change people. How they change people at their core, the way they think, the way they approach life. I think this kind of education is the way to address that, but I don’t have a clue how to prove that to people.
Wiseman: We created Intercultural Studies for Business because in senior exit interviews students said they wished they could integrate foreign language with business. I find the applications of this for what I’m doing in foreign language interesting, using assessment to improve current programs. We discovered that students were doing double majors in language and business, so we created one major to incorporate all those elements.
Zides: A lot of the things I do are integrative but I don’t close the loop with assessment. I never get to see the final product. It will be good to see so many of these projects coming to fruition.
Diedrick: This sort of project gets faculty together and moves them away from thinking of themselves as independent contractors, which is something we learn as graduate students. We can realize we’re in this together, and if we can talk about FYS as a group, for example, we can talk about how we’re teaching writing, etc., and it moves our institutions forward.
Goldey: We’ve discovered we share a lot of common passions for the liberal arts and what we do and we believe that something we’re doing in the freshman year is transformative and this gives us a way to prove it. We can come up with a workable plan to assess outcomes, and even if that is just a by-product of this, I will be happy. I will be really transformed if we can get at those direct measures that demonstrate what we really care about is happening for our students.
Barker: Each institution in the collaborative has a distinct mission, we share a passion for transforming our students, but we also share a passion for doing it in a way that involves integrative learning. Though we’re doing different things, they’re things that fit together. When I look at service learning, I look at the Political Science major who is working on Darfur through an NGO in New York, and how she applies that not only in classes she takes, but also in things that she will teach others. We can help our faculty assess what they’re doing, to prove what they’re doing.
Maultsby: We are a group of colleagues in a consortium where it’s safe to acknowledge failures as well as successes, and this provides a group to interact with beyond our home institutions, where we get set in our ways. It’s exciting to think about assessment, the way it transforms. For instance, medicine used to be called an art; now that we have assessed what procedures work best, what protocols succeed, we know that good medical practice can be measured, and medicine improved. I want the same thing for liberal education.
Diedrick: Looking ahead to the next few weeks and months, Laura and I will be putting together a website and sending that address to you. We encourage you to be looking at the budget and think of ways to start allocating that.
