Assessing Student Work to Support Curriculum Development: An Engineering Case Study

Knowledge and abilities associated with interdisciplinary education include integrating knowledge across disciplines, applying knowledge to real-world situations, and demonstrating skills in creativity, teamwork, communication, and collaboration. This case study discusses how a departmental curriculum committee in Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering at Iowa State University adapted the collaborative assessment protocol used in Washington Center’s national project on Assessing Learning in Learning Communities to meet curriculum committee goals. These goals included developing a strategy for examining engineering students’ interdisciplinary understanding across the curriculum and for ensuring that assessment efforts would support program improvements designed to give engineering graduates the specialized knowledge and abilities named by the National Academy of Engineering. As a means to help students achieve critical learning outcomes by aligning curriculum, instruction, and assessment, the curriculum committee undertook a comprehensive review of student work at different levels by posing the question, “what suggestions might we offer to this student to deepen or develop the work?

When the Students We Have Are Not the Students We Want: The Transformative Power of Learning Communities

Within a 25-year period, the dramatic changes from college education as a “private good” that serves a predominantly white male student population to college education as a “public good”—where almost 90% of high school students of all racial and ethnic backgrounds aspire to attend college—has forced higher education to face a new complex reality: the students present are not the ones we know how to teach. Faced with a series of problems associated with student persistence, retention, and graduation, the challenge for learning community practitioners is to provide evidence to campus leaders that “the magic ingredient” of most successful learning communities—the collaboration between student affairs and academic affairs—does make a difference in student engagement and success. Without evidence and proof, though, learning community programs will not be allocated needed resources. This transcript of a 2007 keynote was given at the 12th Annual National Learning Communities Conference by the statewide director of the P-20 alignment work at the University System of Maryland

Beyond Improved Retention: Building Value-Added Success on a Broad Foundation

Many have documented the positive benefits of Living and Learning Communities (LLCs), but creating an environment that truly integrates living and learning across campus can be a challenge. In this paper we chronicle an LLC program that was intentionally built upon a broad foundation. By including faculty, staff, and student leader representation from across the campus - from admissions and academic affairs to student engagement, residence life, and enrollment management - Cabrini College has created a program that has gone beyond the numerical targets of increased retention and increased academic success. We believe the program has created transformational experiences for many student participants, and that these experiences are the result of the LLC’s integrated design. After providing a history of the program and its unique institutional structure, and offering suggestions for other institutions designing LLCs, we present both quantitative and qualitative measures of success. Richard D. Gebauer is the Director of the First-Year Experience at Cabrini College in Radnor, Pennsylvania. Nancy L. Watterson is an Associate Professor, Social Justice, at Cabrini College. Eric Malm is an Associate Professor of Economics and Business at Cabrini College. Michelle Filling-Brown is an Assistant Professor of English at Cabrini College. John W. Cordes is an Associate Professor in Communication at Cabrini College

Using Faculty Learning Communities to Link FYE and High-Risk Core Courses: A Pilot Study

Can success rates in a gateway course be improved by linking it to a college success course? This article describes the results of a pilot study that linked a first-year biology course that had a high drop-out and failure rate to a college success course that included study skills. The proposal to link courses came from the work of a faculty learning community aimed at sharing strategies for increasing engagement in first year courses. Faculty involved in the link worked closely together. The college success course used biology content to provide hands-on study skills applications for students. The results illustrate that students in the pilot program did significantly better in the biology course as well as in their overall fall GPA than students in the same biology course who were not in the learning community

Assessing the Effectiveness of a Learning Community Course Design to Improve the Math Performance of First-Year Students

National attention is focused on the persistent high failure rates for students enrolled in math courses, and the search for strategies to change these outcomes is on. This study used a mixed-method research design to assess the effectiveness of a learning community course designed to improve the math performance levels of first-year students. Results suggested that investing resources into learning community programs that help students meet collegiate-level math course demands helps promote academic success in math courses and eases students’ college transitions. Participants in the math learning communities reported significantly higher rates of using academic supports, engaging in campus activities, and understanding general education learning outcomes compared to a quasi-control group of students enrolled in the same math courses. Math learning community participants enrolled in introductory algebra courses had higher levels of math performance compared to nonparticipants

Micro-strategies: Small Steps Toward Improved Retention

Learning communities provide an excellent venue for the practice of micro-strategies, intentional efforts aimed at making a difference for a small number of students. Building micro-strategies into the structure of learning communities can help an institution attain a valuable uptick in retention. Equally important, a shared focus on the use of micro-strategies in learning communities creates a generative framework for discussing teaching and learning among faculty and staff. A representative list of micro-strategies is provided along with likely results

The Learning Community Experience: Cultivating a Residual Worldview

In this essay, we conceptualize first-year learning communities as worldviews that, during the first year and residually in subsequent years, allow students to recognize and engage difference and acknowledge and articulate their biases. Students who take part in a learning community have an opportunity to develop the biases and presuppositions of the community, as well as a position that is present throughout life. Using the first-year learning communities at Duquesne University as an example, we contend that inclusion in a learning community upholds a given worldview – as narrative, philosophical or theological system, or shaper of individuals. This, in turn, fosters the biases and presuppositions of the community’s members, a residual outcome that stays with students for the rest of their lives. Christina L. McDowell Marinchak is an Assistant Professor of Business Communication at University of Alaska, Anchorage. David DeIuliis is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication & Rhetorical Studies at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, PA

Juggling and the Art of the Integrative Assignment

When faculty study samples of student work, assignment prompts typically become part of the review. Two experienced learning community faculty from Skagit Valley College examined their students’ work with three questions in mind: whether the work was grounded in disciplinary insights; whether the work leveraged disciplinary knowledge to develop new understanding; and, whether the work was purposefully and critically aware. The analysis that emerged reaffirmed the complex nature of integration: disciplinary knowledge needs to be used, not possessed, and students need to first learn the fundamentals of integration followed by lots and lots of practice. These insights led the teaching team to make simple shifts in emphasis in assignment design and classroom practices that are described in the article. The original integrative assignment for their Philosophy of Religion and Introduction to Film learning community, Sacred Space/Sacred Time/Silver Screen, is included, along with the newly tweaked assignment and students’ self-reflections on the intellectual challenges associated with integrating two disciplines

Improving the Success of Transfer Students: Responding to Risk Factors

How can learning communities be designed to reduce transfer student stress and enhance their learning? This study was designed to investigate the impact of the Criminal Justice Transfer Learning Community experience on its participants’ level of identified stressors over time and their means of coping with those stressors. The Criminal Justice Transfer Learning Community extended for two terms, and was designed to facilitate students’ integration into the university and the criminal justice community. Students in the learning community were asked on multiple occasions to identify stressors and rate their intensity. According to the students, the largest impact on stress reduction was the feeling of belonging to their learning community cohort and the university community