Grant Summary
$25,000 over 12 months. Rhodes College, Franklin & Marshall College, and Niagara University share a commitment to college-community partnerships that are genuinely reciprocal and fundamentally linked to students' educational experiences. Building on this mutual understanding, they seek to assess the value added that involvement in such partnerships has for student learning outcomes. The group will begin with an inventory of similarities and differences in members' approaches to college-community partnerships, and will go on to develop a plan for assessing their programs, focusing especially on the roles of students, faculty and community partners in achieving success in community-based programs. They will read in the relevant literature, and ask questions about specific outcomes to assess; about how assessment of civic engagement integrates with assessment of curricular and classroom learning assessment; about how the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) and other assessment measure might inform their work; and more. Working in consultation with the group as a whole, each campus will develop and then implement a preliminary assessment plan. Project leaders will meet to analyze results and prepare for a second cycle of work. As the work goes forward, the collaborative hopes to engage other partner institutions.