Grant Summary
$25,000 over 12 months. These three colleges propose to refine and develop tools to evaluate community-based learning at each campus: community partnerships developed through Bryn Mawr's Civic Engagement Office; the summer internship program of the Center for Peace and Global Citizenship at Haverford; and academic courses designed in collaboration with Swarthmore's Lang Center. A survey of pre-existing assessment instruments-Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), Reasoning about Current Issues (RCI), and College Senior Survey (CSS)-will form the basis for further work. Project leaders will also identify additional assessment tools already in use on each campus. Faculty members, institutional research officers, and staff will undertake meetings, discussions, and research opportunities to identify areas of cross-campus evaluation, to discover and adapt assessment tools, to perform assessment of each program's components, and to share strengths and weaknesses of the tools and programs. The project promises to help model community-based learning assessment in the context of a richly articulated suite of programs within a liberal arts environment. The educational opportunities that such centers at these colleges make possible and available to students are becoming increasingly important as institutions of higher education seek to build stronger links to communities in which they reside, and to restructure their learning environments in relation to an increasingly global society.