TEAGLE INITIATIVES IN VALUE ADDED ASSESSMENT

The Teagle Foundation is giving high priority to systematic assessment of the outcomes achieved in courses, institutions, and whole sectors of higher education. While colleges already expend great effort in assessing what they do, through such means as teaching evaluations and program reviews, the systematic measurement of the value added in various settings of higher education is an area in which more can be done. Nothing, we believe, has more potential to affect students' educational experience as much as sustained and appropriate assessment of what they learn.

The Foundation's work in this area has so far included the following:

• November 2005: The Foundation's Board of Directors approved a grant to the Associated Colleges of the Midwest, Associated Colleges of the South, and the Great Lakes College Association for an assessment of study abroad programs. These three consortia will build on the work of a planning grant awarded in November, 2004. The Board of Directors also approved a grant to the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media to developer a primer on important issues in value-added assessment.



• May 2005: The Foundation's Board of Directors approved a further thirteen grants, eleven for faculty-driven collaboratives and two for the development of assessment instruments in Outcomes and Assessment.



• April 2005: We continued our discussions of discipline-specific assessment with our first Virtual Listening, which brought together faculty and administrators in the discipline of English to explore assessment issues in that field. Click here (PDF) for a report.



• April 2005: We began our work with discipline-specific assessment, bringing together a group of classicists to discuss issues specific to the assessment of their discipline; click here (PDF) for a report on the day's work and here to learn about the grant that will further that work.



• December 2004: Building on the September Listening, we wrote to a number of colleges and a few universities inviting them to take the lead in the creation of collaboratives focused on value added assessment in student learning.



• November 2004: The Foundation's Board of Directors approved five grants in Outcomes and Assessment to college associations and other similar organizations.



• September 2004: We convened a Listening in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Key figures in assessment (including Roger Benjamin, Richard Hersh, Peter Ewell, and George Kuh), representatives of major educational organizations (including the Council on Independent Colleges, the American Association of Colleges and Universities, the Appalachian College Assocation) and two-person teams from a range of liberal arts colleges spent two days discussing what has been done, what is happening now, and what might happen in this area. For a substantial discussion of this event, see Value Added Assessment: A Report by Peter Struck (PDF).



• May 2004: We requested proposals that would bring together a range of institutions interested in developing and taking full advantage of systematic means of assessing the educational outcomes achieved in liberal education.

Our work in this area will continue, and any further initiatives will be posted on this site.