Insights from Grantees

Restoring the Public Purpose of America's Urban Universities

This white paper focuses on the responsibility of urban universities to their local communities and highlights promising practices across the country, including Columbia University's Freedom and Citizenship Program (a Knowledge for Freedom program). The featured schools are Augsburg University, Columbia University, De Anza College, Rutgers University-Newark, University at Buffalo, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, University of Pennsylvania, and University of San Diego.

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Frankly, My Dear, No One Gives a Damn About General Education!

This white paper critiques the undervalued status of general education in community college and features three community colleges that have received grants from the Cornerstone: Learning for Living initiative to revive the humanities in American colleges and universities. The featured schools are Austin Community College (ACC) in Texas, Linn-Benton Community College (LBCC) in Oregon, and Hostos Community College in New York.

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Paving the Way for Transfer Pathways in Psychology and Sociology

The Independent Transfer Pathways in North Carolina Project, supported by the Teagle Foundation, has emerged as a national model for building scalable, consistent transfer pathways between consortia of independent colleges and universities and community colleges in the region. This final evaluation report from the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) and North Carolina Independent Colleges and Universities (NCICU) highlights how the project advanced a "culture of transfer."

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Change Leadership Toolkit: A Guide for Advancing Systemic Change in Higher Education

This toolkit from USC's Pulias Center for Higher Education, a Teagle grantee, is designed to support higher education professionals in leading systemic change. It includes an array of research-based tools for change that were developed with higher education leaders in varying roles across numerous institutional types nationwide.

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Adaptation Across the Higher Ed Landscape

With the goal of helping to dismantle conventional transfer obstacles, the New England Transfer Guarantee streamlines transfer pathways between community colleges and four-year independent institutions in participating states. Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island have been part of the program since last year; the New England Board of Higher Education, which coordinates the program, is expanding it to Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, based on promising early data.

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Playbook for Transfer Pathways to the Liberal Arts

Ithaka S+R has released the Playbook for Transfer Pathways to the Liberal Arts: How to Design and Implement Statewide Pathways from Community Colleges to Independent Colleges. The playbook, co-sponsored by the Teagle Foundation and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, shows how state associations or consortia of independent colleges can design statewide transfer initiatives that meet the needs of both independent colleges and community colleges, with a solid infrastructure and commitment from multiple stakeholders to sustain it.

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Unified Transfer Systems: A Path Forward

This report discusses Teagle's grant to the New England Board of Higher Education (NEBHE) to implement the New England Independent College Transfer Guarantee to assure acceptance at an independent nonprofit four-year institution for students graduating from community colleges with associate degrees in the liberal arts. This report offers recommendations for developing, improving, and streamlining transfer systematically.

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Innovations in Community College Liberal Arts Programs

This report features three community colleges that have received grants from the Cornerstone: Learning for Living initiative to revive the humanities in American colleges and universities. The featured schools are Austin Community College (ACC) in Texas, Linn-Benton Community College (LBCC) in Oregon, and Lorain County Community College (LCCC) in Ohio.

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Sustaining Successful Transfer Pathways

Three admission leaders share best practices for colleges to better serve transfer students. One of the three authors is Emily Decatur, Project Director of the New England Independent College Transfer Guarantee, a project funded by a $300,000 grant from The Teagle Foundation and the Davis Educational Foundation to assure acceptance at an independent nonprofit four-year institution for students graduating from community colleges with associate degrees in the liberal arts.

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7 Strategies to Make Professional Development Successful

This guide offers seven tips for how highly effective teachers continually innovate and refine their pedagogical practices through professional development.

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Transfer Pathways to the Liberal Arts: Grantee Convenings

This webinar convening focused on addressing the academic obstacles that community college students face to transfer into independent colleges.

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Bringing the Humanities and Liberal Learning to the Study of Business

In this Preface to a Special Issue of the Humanistic Management Journal, which was funded by a Liberal Arts and the Professions grant from the Teagle Foundation, co-editors Anne M. Greenhalgh, Douglas E. Allen, and Jeffrey Nesteruk present "a new narrative" of integrating liberal learning into business education.

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Transfer Pathways to Independent Colleges

A new report by Ithaka S+R, a not-for-profit research organization, describes the untapped potential of liberal arts transfer pathways into independent colleges and offers concrete strategies for tackling the academic, financial, and cultural dimensions of transfer.

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Mapping the City University of New York

This report describes policies and programs across CUNY that relate to students impacted by the criminal justice system and explores opportunities to better engage and support those students. The research was conducted by the Institute for Justice and Opportunity at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, which received Teagle grants in 2015 and 2017 to support formerly incarcerated individuals in the transition back into the community and in higher education.

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The "Cornerstone" Approach to Reinvigorating the Liberal Arts (Webinar Recording)

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The Seminar Goes to Work: Towards a Theory of Collaborative Literacy

This article presents scholarly and practice-based evidence that literature discussions can improve workplace collaboration. These discussions are an integral aspect of Books@Work’s approach to bringing to the humanities to settings outside the academy. The Teagle Foundation made grant to support this initiative in 2015, 2017, and 2020.

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Giant Leaps for the Liberal Arts at Purdue

This article in Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning by Teagle grantee Melinda Zook highlights how the College of Liberal Arts at Purdue University took bold measures to reverse the tide of dramatic enrollment declines with the Cornerstone program. 

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Transfer Pathways to the Liberal Arts (Webinar Recording)

The Teagle Foundation hosted a webinar in October 2019 on liberal arts transfer pathways in collaboration with Ithaka S+R and North Carolina Independent Colleges and Universities (NCICU). Ithaka S+R shared data on the scale and potential community college transfer to independent colleges, while NCICU described their experience with launching a comprehensive transfer agreement with the North Carolina Community College System. The webinar wrapped up with a discussion of Teagle’s funding opportunity for leaders interested in collaboratively building liberal arts transfer pathways between community colleges and independent colleges in their region or state. The slides from the presentation include links to transfer agreements developed by NCICU and other transfer-related resources. Ithaka S+R will publish a paper on their analysis of the transfer opportunity for independent colleges in January 2020.

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"Not Just for the Privileged" at The Teagle Foundation 75th Anniversary Forum

To mark its 75th anniversary, Teagle held a forum entitled "Educating for Freedom -- for All", which featured leaders and fresh voices promoting equity in higher education.

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A Town Hall Model as Curricular Component and Tool for Curricular Reform

Amy Sarch discusses how Shenandoah University incorporated role play and deliberative dialogue into its revised general education curriculum. SU Town Hall classes--made possible by a Teagle grant in 2014--require students to explore a social issue from the disciplinary lens of their GE class and share that informed perspective with peers, faculty, and community consultants at a Town Hall convening.

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Preparing Future Faculty: A Framework for Program Design and Evaluation at the University Level

This report provides information about the evidence needed to understand program impacts, as well as tips from prior Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) programs for collecting and analyzing data for program evaluation.

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Mapping the Landscape of Higher Education in New York State Prisons

This report is intended to help state and local policymakers, institutions of higher education, DOCCS, advocates, and the general public understand the landscape of college education programs in prison, appreciate their value, and strategize about how to build on current success. The report describes the two systems – higher education and corrections – that are seemingly distinct, yet come together to provide access to college education for incarcerated people.

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Work in Progress: Transformation through Liberal Arts-Focused Grand Challenges Scholars Programs

The National Academy of Engineering’s Grand Challenges Scholars Program (GCSP) was created to better prepare students to tackle the immense and immensely complex challenges of the twenty-first century. The program does this by providing education and experiences in five competency areas: talent, multidisciplinary, viable business/entrepreneurship, multicultural, and social consciousness. These competencies align well with education and experiences often acquired under the umbrella of the liberal arts.

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Understanding Students’ Narratives of Grand Challenges Scholars Program as a Nexus

Through this panel discussion and paper, we bring together GCSP Scholars from four different institutions funded by the Teagle Foundation to explicitly bridge liberal arts and STEM education through GCSP.

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Hybrid Learning and the Residential Liberal Arts Experience

Based on the evaluation of the Teagle Foundation's Hybrid Learning and the Residential Liberal Arts Experience, program director Loni Bordoloi Pazich and external evaluators Martin Kurzweil and Daniel Rossman of Ithaka S+R distill key findings in this Change Magazine article.

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In Search of Curricular Coherence

In fall 2013 The Teagle Foundation issued an RFP inviting selected institutions and organizations to apply for grants that addressed the following question: “How can faculty work together to create a more coherent and intentional curriculum whose goals, pathways, and outcomes are clear to students and other constituencies with a stake in the future of higher education?” This essay is based on an evaluation of four of the early grants in this initiative.

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Text to Text | ‘The Metamorphosis’ and ‘How Social Isolation Is Killing Us’

Executive director of Books@Work Ann Kowal Smith was invited to co-author an edition of the New York Times series "Text to Text."  

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How People Learn II

How People Learn II: Learners, Contexts, and Cultures expands on the foundation laid out in the influential 2000 report published by the National Academy of Sciences and takes an in-depth look at the constellation of influences that affect individual learning.

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Quantifying Assessment Of Undergraduate Critical Thinking

The authors assessed the change in critical thinking skills with a sample of 176 students enrolled at either the University of Colorado Boulder (UCB) or Colorado College (CC) by employing the Critical-thinking Assessment Test (CAT) developed with collaboration and support from the National Science Foundation.

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Making Sense of the College Curriculum: Faculty Stories of Change, Conflict, and Accommodation

Faculty members representing all sectors of higher education, share personal, humorous, powerful, and poignant stories about their experiences in a life that is more a calling than a profession.

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Charting a New Course for Next Generation Business Leaders

Ideal for faculty and administrators looking to blend business education and the liberal arts, this toolkit combines exemplary syllabi from 26 leading institutions with step-by-step strategies to advocate successfully for curricular innovation.

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Collaborating to Cut Costs: How One College Works with Others to Save Money & Expand Programs

This Chronicle of Higher Education spotlight features the work of New York Six consortium members participating in two different Teagle Foundation grants.

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Refining the Paradigm: Holistic Evaluation of Faculty to Support Faculty and Student Learning

In “Refining the Paradigm,” the authors address the issues found in current models of faculty evaluation and provide ideas for supporting faculty development and taking a holistic approach to evaluation.

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The Future of Learning: How Colleges Can Transform the Educational Experience

In this special report from The Chronicle of Higher Education, reporter Beth McMurtie describes findings from the external evaluation of Teagle's Hybrid Learning and the Residential Liberal Arts Experience conducted by Ithaka S+R.

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Innovation and the Independent College: Examples from the Sector

The signature activity of the Council of Independent Colleges’ initiative, Securing America’s Future, was a series of eight workshops hosted by CIC member presidents on campuses across the nation in 2016–2017. This report presents an overview of the major points of discussion and references examples of innovations shared by the colleges and universities that attended the workshops. 

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The Power of Pooled Funding to Increase College Graduation Rates in New York City

The College Completion Innovation Fund is the first collaborative fund focused exclusively on college retention and completion in New York City. This report details the development of the fund, grants awarded, benefits for funders as well as benefits to the field.

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Faculty Collaboration and Technology in the Liberal Arts: Lessons from a Teagle Grant Program

The Teagle Foundation partnered with Ithaka S&R, a not-for-profit research group, to gather lessons learned across funded projects under its "Hybrid Learning & the Residential Liberal Arts Experience" initiative.

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The Role of Teaching and Teacher Training in the Hiring and Promotion of Ph.D. Economists

Surveys suggest that a majority of graduate students seek academic positions after completing their degree. The authors survey groups involved in the job market to determine the roles of teaching and research in hiring and the subsequent success of new faculty.

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Northwestern University History Department Teaching Binder

This electronic “binder” brings together resources contributed by graduate students, faculty, and staff on teaching effectively in history and preparing a teaching portfolio for the academic job market.

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Strategies to Prepare Future Faculty to Assess Student Learning

The Council of Graduate Schools’ Preparing Future Faculty to Assess Student Learning initiative was a three-year project to identify models for infusing undergraduate learning assessment skills into existing Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) programs.

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Doing Curricular Change in a Shared Governance Setting: A Survival Guide

This “survival guide” was developed by faculty from over a dozen departments and across four colleges at San Francisco State University based on their experience with redesigning majors in a shared governance setting.

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Paths to Engagement: Provoking Intellectual Ferment through Pedagogies of Social Participation

Based on his evaluation of the Teagle Foundation’s A Larger Vision for Student Learning initiative, William Sullivan shares lessons learned on deepening students’ sense of civic responsibility and strategies to support faculty and staff commitment to these ends in Change Magazine.

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Ingredients for Sustainable Change

What are the elements that leaders that should keep in mind when pushing for change that sticks? This handout serves as a discussion and planning tool for teams.

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Collaboration Continuum

In common practice the term collaboration serves as a handy label to mark and acknowledge working relationships between individuals, departments, or organizations. This handout serves as a discussion and planning tool for leaders of projects that involve multiple entities and is especially relevant for higher education consortia.

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Students’ Concept-Building Approaches: A Novel Predictor of Success in Chemistry Courses

Recent basic cognitive science research suggests that there are individual differences in how learners approach conceptual tasks: some learners tend toward rote concept-learning (exemplar learners), whereas other learners tend to use abstraction concept-learning. The authors explored the possibility that this individual difference in concept-building might have consequences for classroom learning

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Shared Governance: Changing with the Times

Building upon AGB’s study published in 2016, “Shared Governance: Is OK Good Enough?” this report provides qualitative information on the state of shared governance.

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Structuring Equality: A Handbook for Student-Centered Learning and Teaching Practices

The basic premise of student-centered, engaged learning is that, to make a truly equitable and democratic society, we have to begin with a form of instruction that is itself equitable.
 

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Creating Cohesive Paths to Civic Engagement: Five Approaches to Institutionalizing Civic Engagement

The Teagle Foundation-funded Creating Cohesive Paths to Civic Engagement (2013-2016) spurred Periclean member institutions to inventory, map, and strengthen civic engagement across the curriculum. This white paper documents the process and how it can serve as a powerful catalyst for change on campuses.

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Strengthening Capacity Through Collaborative Research

Three examples highlight the relative roles of faculty, institutional leaders and consortium staff in advancing faculty development through collaborative research. Discussion includes the value of drawing from the learning sciences and theories of change. Professional learning communities are a powerful capacity building vehicle in which to strengthen shared learning and support amount multiple stakeholders. 

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Consortial Leadership Toward Large-Scale Change

Based on her evaluation of the Teagle Foundation's Faculty Work and Student Learning in the 21st Century initiative, Adrianna Kezar distills practical strategies consortial and other higher education leaders should keep in mind when scaling and sustaining change efforts.

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Improving Faculty Preparation in Research Universities

The Teagle Foundation’s Graduate Student Teaching in the Arts and Sciences (GSTAS) initiative, first piloted in 2010 and expanded in 2012, engaged hundreds of graduate students, faculty, staff, and senior administrators across eight elite universities and two professional associations in thinking deeply about undergraduate teaching and learning. This white paper describes findings and lessons learned from site visits to seven GSTAS grantees.

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Recursive Validity and Authentic Outcomes

This peer-reviewed article lays out a framework to assess student learning, particularly for “externally-facing” assignments – assignments that connect coursework to “real world” community or public policy issues, and harness the data to promote institutional recruitment, improvement, and accountability.

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A New Paradigm for Faculty Work & Evaluation

This book chapter by Richard Gilman, Nancy Hensel, and David Salomon outlines an approach to the faculty reward system that recognizes the totality of faculty work encompassing teaching, advising, research, and service while managing faculty workload in a manner that better supports student learning.

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Strategies for Integrating Creative Activity into Faculty Work

This video features a faculty workshop that highlights strategies for integrating undergraduate research, scholarship, and creative activity into faculty workload through case studies. 

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Civic Professionalism: A Pathway to Practical Wisdom for the Liberal Arts

A research group made up of teams from six higher education institutions, under the aegis of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life and with funding from the Teagle Foundation, has explored the relationship of civic engagement to the development of professional skills and vocational pathways within the context and values of the liberal arts. 

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Practice for Life: Making Decisions in College

Practice for Life builds a compelling case that a liberal arts education offers students a complex, valuable process of self-creation, one that begins in college but continues far beyond graduation.

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2016 LVAIC Technology Cookbook

The Lehigh Valley Association of Independent Colleges (LVAIC) developed a “technology cookbook” to provide faculty members with “recipes” on incorporating digital tools in their classroom

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Improving Quality in American Higher Education

Based on a national, multidisciplinary effort to define and measure learning outcomes—the Measuring College Learning project—this book identifies 'essential concepts and competencies' for six disciplines.

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Teaching and Learning in History

Laura Westhoff (University of Missouri St. Louis) discusses how her early interest in teaching and her research on the social construction of knowledge helped lead her to work in the scholarship of teaching and learning within the history discipline.

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Pioneer of History Learning Scholarship

How can historians use the scholarship of teaching and learning to bridge the gap between what historians do and what students learn?

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Multicultural Education and Mass Violence: Critical Examination by Two Student Groups

In this article, we outline a project designed to foster diversity at Queensborough Community College (QCC) of the City University of New York. 

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The Impact of Feedback as Formative Assessment on Student Performance

This article provides an evaluation of the redesign of a research methods course intended to enhance students’ learning for understanding and transfer.

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Teaching To Big Questions

This website showcases creations, collaborations, and contributions from the community of six community colleges.

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Preparing for Evaluation: Lessons from a Review of the College-Community Connections Initiative

How do we know when an initiative is ready to pursue a rigorous evaluation? More and more funders, policymakers, and program leaders recognize the value of high-quality evidence.

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Creating Diverse Communities

Enrolling a diverse student body, hiring a diverse group of faculty and staff members—these are necessary steps toward the goal of building diverse communities, but too often they are seen as ends in themselves.

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Using Student Engagement Results to Oversee Educational Quality

Board members must come to understand the importance of student engagement and how institutions under their leadership can use it to improve educational quality.

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Exploring Classroom Community: A Social Network Study of Reacting to the Past

In this exploratory social network study, we examined how student relationships evolved during three month-long Reacting to the Past (RTTP) role-playing games in a lower division honors course at a large US public university. 

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American Historical Association Ad Hoc Committee on Contingent Faculty: Final Report

The American Historical Association formed a committee in the spring of 2014 with the charge of analyzing how working conditions for contingent history faculty affect educational quality in the classroom as well as quality of life. 

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Cultivating Growth at the Leading Edges: Public Engagement in Higher Education

In this issue of Diversity & Democracy, David Hoffman, Craig Berger, and Beverly Bickel from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) point to what they call "the visionary's dilemma." They ask: "How can a movement gain traction when the dominant culture's theories, knowledge, politics, and conventional mechanisms for social and institutional change reflect the status quo?"

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Case Studies: American Society for Engineering Education

This set of case studies, prepared by Sheila Tobias and published by the American Society of Engineering Education, illustrates how campuses can provide liberal arts students with “technological literacy” grounded in the discipline of engineering while providing engineering students with a better sense of the social, cultural, and political context for problem-solving in engineering.

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People, Tools, and Processes that Build Collaborative Capacity

This white paper offers conceptual and practical tools to help collaborators and their collaborations succeed. Our goal is to provide practitioners, administrators, assessment professionals, and organizational partners with an integrated framework to help identify and align the people, tools, and processes necessary for collaborative efforts.

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Faculty Leadership for Integrative Liberal Learning

The publication aims to elucidate the value and use of integrative liberal learning and the best pedagogical and faculty leadership practices to prepare students for applying their learning to complex challenges in life, career, and citizenship.

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Metacognitive Strategies in the Introduction to Political Science Classroom

By assessing changes in student learning, the article investigates, identifies and isolates specific and transferable classroom interventions for improving student learning and proposes using metacognitive-based teaching strategies in a political science classroom.

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From Polyps to Politics: Using a Coral Reef Living Laboratory in a Politics of Sustainability Course

To address these challenges and improve student learning, a faculty-student team integrated a coral reef living laboratory into a Politics of Sustainability course which focuses on Global Environmental Politics. This article provides empirical evidence of improved student learning outcomes by using pre/post assessment tools, student surveys, and faculty journals.

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Everything I Know About Teaching I Learned From Jazz

The processes of learning and creating jazz provide a way to illustrate new teaching methods that allow students to discover new knowledge through their own creative interests and to develop self-efficacy with the material.

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Peer Review: Faculty Leadership for Integrative Liberal Learning

This issue of Peer Review, sponsored by the Teagle and Mellon foundations, offers insights about the central role of faculty in galvanizing the necessary experiences that cross disciplines, units, and campus boundaries to promote integrative learning.

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Behavioral Ethics and Teaching Ethical Decision Making

Business education often renders students less likely to act ethically. An infusion of liberal learning in the form of behavioral ethics could improve this situation by prompting students to develop higher levels of professionalism that encompass ethics, social responsibility, self-critical reflection, and personal accountability.

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More than Bells without Clappers: Students Finding Voice through Civic Engagement with Big Questions

With the national conversation about college emphasizing timely degree completion and readiness for employment, how can community college educators prepare our students to tackle the big questions they currently experience and will further confront in the complex, changing environment of our interconnected global future?

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2015 LVAIC Technology Cookbook

The Lehigh Valley Association of Independent Colleges (LVAIC) developed a “technology cookbook” to provide faculty members with “recipes” on incorporating digital tools in their classroom.

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Improving Teaching, Learning, and Assessment by Making Evidence of Achievement Transparent

Authentic student achievements that are addressed to a real world audience can lead to richly detailed portfolios of work that add value to degrees and the granting institutions. A guide is provided for implementation of new high-impact practices, including structured assignment creation.

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In Search of a Match

This guide offers strategies for helping students identify, consider, and enroll in “match” colleges — that is, selective colleges that are a good fit for students based on their academic profiles, financial considerations, and personal needs. 

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Creating Courses about Global Forces: Global Challenges and General Education

This article describes the work of faculty members and administrators at California State University, Fresno to create courses in the General Education (GE) program taught around the Global Challenges framework developed by members of AASCU’s Global Engagement Initiative.

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The Science of Learning: An Overview for Graduate Student Instructors

Keynote address by Silvia Bunge at the Teaching Conference for First-Time GSIs, sponsored by the Graduate Division's Graduate Student Instructor Teaching & Resource Center at UC Berkeley, on January 16, 2015.

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Leadership Practices for Interfaith Excellence in Higher Education

The religious dynamics of higher education are changing rapidly. College campuses have become prime sites for conflicts involving religious identity. 

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Scaling and Sustaining Change and Innovation

This guide distills key lessons learned about scaling and sustaining innovation from ten projects involved in the Teagle Foundation’s “Faculty Work and Student Learning in the 21st Century” grant initiative.

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Moving from Transfer-Receiving to Transfer-Serving

In this report, we describe the process the institutions undertook to become transfer-serving institutions, a process that requires a mindful focus on transfer.

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Redefining the Paradigm: Faculty Models to Support Student Learning

This monograph represents the thinking and conclusions of the participating institutions, which are designed to improve student learning, more accurately reflect faculty work in the 21st century, and continue moving our institutions forward in the age of technology and changing modalities of teaching and learning.

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Assessing AASCU’s Global Challenges Blended Model Course

This paper explores the effectiveness of the national blended course in meeting its stated learning objectives. In 2013-14, pre/post-tests were conducted on three pilot campuses. The pre/post-tests indicate that students’ knowledge about global issues and ways to get involved in civic life increased after taking the model course. 

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Making the Connection: Six Studies of Technology and Collaboration in Liberal Arts Institutions

Even as the value of liberal arts institutions has historically been defined by a small, highly interpersonal classroom experience, the consortium pursued a vision in which new technologies would allow liberal arts faculty and staff to forge partnerships with colleagues within and across institutions. 

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Distance-Mentored Undergraduate Research

With the support of the Teagle Foundation, COPLAC has probed the viability of distance-mentored undergraduate research, in which students from one institution conduct research under the supervision of expert faculty at another.

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Minds on Fire: How Role-Immersion Games Transform College

Minds on Fire is a provocative critique of educational reformers who deplored role-playing pedagogies, from Plato to Dewey to Erikson. Carnes also makes an impassioned appeal for pedagogical innovation. At a time when cost-cutting legislators and trustees are increasingly drawn to online learning, Carnes focuses on how bricks-and-mortar institutions of higher education can set young minds on fire.

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Building Faculty Capacity Through the Learning Sciences

This article addresses three questions: What do professors need to know about the science of learning to teach most effectively, how can they find out if what they are doing is working, and how can faculty-development efforts best help them apply the knowledge drawn from the research?

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What is a Reader? A White Paper on Undergraduate Literacy and the Future of Literary Studies

The “What is a Reader?” project convened a set of scholars and teachers from four university English and literature departments to consider what is happening to our students’ reading in the twenty-first century and to explore how we might adapt our practices in English and Literature departments and larger university settings to take account of these changes.

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Advancing Excellence, Enhancing Equity: Making the Case for Assessment at MSIs

The report serves as a resource to the higher education community, highlighting strategies for assessing and improving student learning outcomes. It grows out of several years of  work focused on increasing institutional capacity to assess student learning outcomes at MSIs. 

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Overseeing Educational Quality: A How-To Guide for Boards of Universities and Colleges

AGB—with support from the Teagle Foundation, an advisory committee, and teams from eight diverse institutions—has developed a set of tools and resources that can help college and university boards work more effectively with campus leaders and faculty to monitor the assessment and improvement of student learning and educational quality.

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Classroom Research Working Paper Series: Volume 1

Beyond the walls of our classrooms and the ever-growing classrooms without walls, such as online courses and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), the best way to improve our society is to build the knowledge-base and critical thinking skills of ourselves and our next generation of the world’s citizens.

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Classroom Research Working Paper Series: Volume 2

How does writing change when we move online? And how do we situate new technologies and their attendant forms of writing within the larger context of what it means to teach students how to communicate through the written word?

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Classroom Research Working Paper Series: Volume 3

Using qualitative research methods, quantitative research methods, and assessment strategies, teachers collect data about their own classrooms, as researchers collect data, to inform and improve their teaching and ultimately student learning.

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Graduate Student Instructor Teaching & Resource Center

The GSI Teaching & Resource Center helps graduate students transition to teaching as GSIs at UC Berkeley and offers programs and services to assist graduate students in developing their teaching skills for future academic and nonacademic careers.

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Change Requires Discipline

Disciplinary societies can lead the battle for the rights of non-tenure-track faculty members, say two leaders of the University of Southern California’s Delphi Project.

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Using Performance Tasks to Improve Quantitative Reasoning in an Introductory Mathematics Course

Two mathematicians study how they can improve quantitative reasoning skills in their students by comparing different approaches to implementing “performance tasks."

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Changing the Conversation about Higher Education

This book hopes to change the nature of the conversation about higher education from critiques to focusing on efforts of systematic improvement in undergraduate education.

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Great Lakes Colleges Association Lattice for Educational Research and Practice

These summaries of research literature on learning and the application of research principles to undergraduate pedagogy seek to inform considerations of effective teaching and learning among faculty members of our GLCA member colleges.

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Assessing Students’ Moral and Spiritual Growth at Catholic Liberal Arts Colleges

Three New England Catholic colleges collaborated to evaluate students' religious, spiritual, moral and ethical growth.

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The Periclean Diamond: Linking College Classrooms, Campuses, Communities, and Colleagues

The Periclean colleges and universities share a common commitment to what we term “High Engagement Learning”: intensive pedagogical techniques and faculty-student interaction involving extraordinary levels of attention and energy, whether inside or outside of the classroom.

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Using Assessment Results: Promising Practices of Institutions That Do It Well

This report synthesizes the insights from nine individual case studies to discern promising practices in using information about student learning. The report concludes with lessons learned and reflective questions to help institutions advance their own assessment efforts within their specific institutional contexts.

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The Senior Capstone: Transformative Experiences in the Liberal Arts

The survey reports that capstone experiences typically lead to many of the benefits associated with undergraduate research experiences: development of skills in writing and oral communication, critical thinking, and research; an increased interest in research; an empowering sense of academic self-confidence and achievement; and development of project management skills.

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Women’s Studies as Civic Engagement: Research and Recommendations

This report argues that women's studies has key lessons to offer about fostering civic engagement at the course level that will deepen student learning in the college setting, contribute respectfully to communities in which they become involved, and produce lifelong civic leaders. 

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Developing Transferable Geospatial Skills in a Liberal Arts Context

After testing the spatial visualization skills of undergraduate students in a variety of disciplines, the authors found that geology, fine arts, and physics students had the highest average spatial test scores even after controlling for gender and grade point average.

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Literary Study, Measurement, and the Sublime: Disciplinary Assessment

This collection of essays, edited by Donna Heiland and Laura J. Rosenthal, represents an enticing and interesting series of ideas and experiences about the work of assessment in literature and related fields that often resist the language and the methods of standard forms of assessment.

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Engaging Sophomore Students with Liberal Learning: Focused Exploration through Academic Advising

This report offers recommendations for instituting initiatives that allow sophomores to more successfully focus on their exploration of liberal learning at small colleges. It summarizes advising practices including advising as learning, advising in sophomore gatherings, sophomore courses, and faculty-student collaborative research.

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Preparing Future Faculty to Assess Student Learning

This report provides data and insights gleaned from assessment experts, graduate deans, and graduate students about opportunities to integrate preparation in learning assessment into professional development programs for graduate students.

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Pathways to Learning Collegium

The GLCA Pathways to Learning Collegium has taught us how a comparatively modest amount of Foundation funding can foster a substantial community of interest in pursuing innovative approaches to pedagogy and comparing the impact of those approaches to more traditional styles of teaching.

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Taking Teaching to (Performance) Task: Linking Pedagogical and Assessment Practices

This article published in Change Magazine describes the power of “performance tasks”: assignments where students engage in a real-world scenario, where they need to confront complexity and ambiguity, and use both disciplinary content and higher order thinking skills to arrive at a judgment or decision

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Investigating the Utility of High-Performance Computing Capabilities

Liberal arts colleges want to provide the greatest academic opportunities to our students, and provide faculty with the tools necessary to present these opportunities in their undergraduate courses. 

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Creating Active Pathways to Student Learning: A Learning to Learn Project

SEPCHE investigated the extent to which learning factors are enhanced by altering instruction to incorporate active pathways to learning. 

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Big Science at Small Colleges: A Collaborative Model for Genomics Curriculum Development

”Big Science at Small Colleges” centered on a grassroots model for faculty development in genomics education at liberal arts colleges with research active faculty.

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The Undergraduate Major in Language and Literature

Working over a period of eighteen months, this group studied new ways of organizing English and language programs within the general parameters of a liberal arts education. The group also explored ways to strengthen majors in our fields and attract new generations of students to a traditional core of liberal study: language, literature, and culture.

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How Religion Meets the World

The GTU’s Preparing Future Faculty Project applied an alternative vocational development model over two semesters of work with teams of doctoral students and faculty mentors in order to consider factors which encouraged a central pedagogical and professional focus on “big questions” of meaning and value.

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The Classics Major and Liberal Education

Over the course of eighteen months, a project based at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington D.C. studied undergraduate programs in classics with the goal of developing a better sense of how a major in classics fit within the broader agenda of liberal education.

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The Religion Major and Liberal Education

At a time when leaders in higher education are increasingly asking students to engage the large issues of life’s meaning and to think critically and responsibly about their role in the world, religious studies offers unique opportunities.

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The History Major and Undergraduate Liberal Education

How does the study of history contribute to liberal learning as a basis for a lifelong engagement with ideas and civic culture?

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Liberal Education and Preparation for a Life of Work

In this paper, we explore these alternative conceptions of liberal education in interaction with two significant factors: 1) shifting demographics and expectations in the college-going population, and 2) changes in the nature of work itself.

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The Pedagogy of Belief and Doubt

This White Paper sketches out the many ways in which we have come to define and employ a pedagogy of belief and doubt in a variety of classroom experiences.

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Secularity and the Liberal Arts

This White Paper describes how four campuses with different Protestant histories developed conversations about their institutions’ secular boundaries. Paying attention to and beginning to analyze what makes this conversation difficult helps educators and students see the conversation’s promise—for student learning and civic life.

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The Economics Major and a Liberal Education

The goal of this report is to consider the relationship between the goals and objectives of the economics major and goals and objectives of a liberal education. Is the economics major playing its part in meeting those objectives?

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Evidence of Learning

This report describes important lessons that merged from the consortial experience as the member institutions charted into this new territory.

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Liberal Education and Study Abroad: Assessing Learning Outcomes to Improve Program Quality

The primary purpose of this project has been to develop a set of instruments that will allow an empirical analysis of the impact of different program characteristics and types on liberal arts learning goals using assessment methods which include, but are not limited to, student satisfaction and self report.

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Biochemistry / Molecular Biology and Liberal Education

The Foundation’s grant allowed a Working Group of ASBMB members to assess how the recommended curriculum in biochemistry and molecular biology (BMB) is implemented at a range of institutions, and also provided an opportunity to consider the relationship of a hierarchical, interdisciplinary science major such as BMB to broad educational goals.

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Strengthening Liberal Arts Education by Embracing Place and Particularity

This paper describes research undertaken by Calvin College to explore the intersection of the liberal arts and the particulars of place. 

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Global Education for All Students: Innovation & Integration in Expanding Learning Abroad

Mount Holyoke faculty, students, administrators and alumnae met to discuss three major areas: (1) how to entice all students to learn abroad; (2) how to expand summer and study abroad in a financially sustainable way; and (3) how better to integrate students’ learning abroad experiences into their educational pathways.

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Religious Engagement Among American Undergraduates: SSRC Guide

Recent studies of college students' attitudes toward religion suggest that the academy is no longer the bastion of secularism it was once assumed to be. To help make sense of these changes, the SSRC offers this online guide, which was derived from a series of essays it commissioned from leading authorities in the field of religion and higher education.

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Student Learning and Faculty Research: Connecting Teaching and Scholarship

On the basis of existing evidence and our own observation, we contend that the teacher-scholar model of faculty professional activity brings important benefits to individual student learners, institutions where that model flourishes, and to society more broadly.

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Essay Forum on the Religious Engagements of American Undergraduates

Recent studies of college students' attitudes toward religion suggest that the academy is no longer the bastion of secularism it was once assumed to be. To help make sense of these changes, the SSRC commissioned the following series of essays from leading authorities in the field of religion and higher education.

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Assessment of Liberal Education Outcomes

This report captures “work in progress”—both in terms of the sheer variety of the assessment projects and the many concerns on campus about the purposes and practices basic to assessing learning gains over time.

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Eliminating Racial Disparities in College Completion and Achievement

In order to close racial and ethnic gaps in educational attainment, it is necessary to focus on closing gaps in both college enrollment, and college achievement and graduation. In this report, we focus on what colleges and universities can do to ensure that among the students they admit, achievement and graduation rates are comparable across racial and ethnic groups.

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The Values of the Open Curriculum: An Alternative Tradition in Liberal Education

The open curriculum is based on a belief in the power of student choice exercised in collaboration with faculty. Such a curriculum gives students great freedom but expects considerable responsibility in return, and it requires significant faculty engagement to shape, support, and inspire student learning.

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Interdisciplinary Education at Liberal Arts Institutions

Together, the survey and interview data have been used to map the different ensembles of interdisciplinary education programs and assessment practices in liberal arts colleges and universities nationwide, to analyze differences in the meanings and mechanics between these various ensembles, and to explore possible assessment alternatives for the future.

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Beyond the Rankings: Measuring Learning in Higher Education

Coverage of higher education often seems to accept as an article of faith that college students learn what they set out to learn as long as they pass their courses and get degrees. The diploma seems to matter most to journalists and, frankly, to employers; it is treated as a proxy indicating that a graduate has absorbed a body of knowledge or mastered a set of usable skills.

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Rethinking the Pedagogy of Ethnicity

The paper that follows is a traditional White Paper in the sense that it outlines a theoretical understanding of ethnicity and offers strategies and recommendations for approaching the pedagogy of ethnicity in higher education. 

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A Toolkit for Revitalizing the Role of the Humanities in General Education

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Knowledge for Freedom

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Toolkit for Knowledge for Freedom

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IJTLHE: Special Issue on Faculty Planning and Curricular Coherence

This 2021 Special Issue of the International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (IJTLHE) is a product of The Teagle Foundation's Faculty Planning and Curricular Coherence initiative, through which over 115 institutions implemented projects to promote greater curricular coherence and student success. This issue includes articles that recognize the critical role faculty play in this work, as well as strategies on how to position curricular coherence as an instructional innovation and catalyst for broader change.

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