The Association of American Colleges and Universities will announce on Monday a three-year, $2.2-million project that will help eight states test how well they are improving student learning and how they assess it.
The Quality Collaboratives project, which is financed by the Lumina Foundation for Education, aims to help the states chart a path by which they can raise—and document—students' level of achievement while also improving college-completion rates. The eight states participating in the project are California, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Oregon, Utah, Virginia, and Wisconsin.
Through the effort, faculty members, leaders of state higher-education systems, and assessment experts will test approaches to the measure of learning as demonstrated in samples of students' work. The approaches are designed to help colleges develop educational practices that aid students in meeting key learning goals, to document their reaching those goals, and to foster the transfer of course credits from two-year to four-year colleges.
The project is built on a separate effort, known as the Degree Qualifications Profile, in which Lumina has sought to establish a national framework for measuring student learning. It spells out reference points for what students should be demonstrating at each degree level in five areas: broad, integrative knowledge; specialized knowledge; intellectual skills; applied learning; and civic learning.
"It's exciting that so many states and campuses are eager to explore and develop measures of achievement for all students," said Terry Rhodes, director of the Quality Collaboratives project and a vice president at the college association. "It is recognition in higher education, echoed by employers, that it isn't enough to simply earn a degree, but essential that the quality of learning and level of competence also be an integral part of determining degree attainment."
