97 th Annual Meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities

1. Sketching our own ZU Design for Student Learning Insights from: Global Positioning Essential Learning, Student Success and the Currency of U.S. Degrees 97th Annual Meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities San Francisco, California January 26 – 29, 2011

2. Conference Word Cloud Intentionality LEAP Degree Qualifications Profile Rubrics Learning-centered High Impact Practices Student Success Learning Outcomes Accountability Trading Zones Interdisciplinary Faculty Development Competencies PKAL Integration Lumina Foundation Assessment STEM

3. Key Highlights of the Conference • Pre-Meeting Symposium: Integrating the Arts, Sciences and Humanities • Workshop: This is your campus on Assessment • Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses • Roadmap for Student Success • Lumina Foundation’s Proposed Degree Qualifications Profile

4. Pre-Meeting Symposium: Integrating the Arts, Sciences and Humanities • Trade knowledge – trading zones • Different disciplines working together so that each person has deep knowledge of own discipline, working knowledge of others’. • Real world problems require interdisciplinary thinking and different perspectives • Examples from different universities: DNA Dance at James Madison University; some universities use industry as outside experts who assess real-world problems assigned to students.

5. Workshop: This is your campus on Assessment • As Zayed University prepares for its 2nd self-study for Middle-States re-accreditation, assessment is in the minds of many. • Must address the big questions: • What are we doing? • Is what we are doing helping students learn?

6. Approaches to Assessment Cave dwellers Champions

7. Cultural Components of Meaningful Assessment • Different institutions create their own brand of assessment. Knowledge Thinking Having Doing Language Objects & Symbols Values & Customs

8. What is the story we want to tell? How do you plan to use the evidence? How will you know if you have good enough evidence? What are the goals you want to reach?

9. Basic Logic Model in Assessment

10. Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses • Are undergraduates really learning anything once they get to college? According to Richard Arum and JosipaRoksa, the answer is no. • According to their analysis of more than 2,300 undergraduates at twenty-four institutions, 45 percent of these students demonstrate no significant improvement in a range of skills—including critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing—during their first two years of college.

11. Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses • Arum and Roksa argue that for many faculty and administrators this finding will come as no surprise—instead, they are the expected result of a student body distracted by socializing or working and an institutional culture that puts undergraduate learning close to the bottom of the priority list. • They found the following measures associated with learning: • Faculty expectations • Course requirements (reading and writing) • Studying alone • College majors: Social Science/Humanities and Science/Math

12. Roadmap for Student Success Student Success • Essential Learning Outcomes • Cross Divisional Collaboration • Program Integration • High Impact Practices • Assessment

13. Lumina Foundation: Proposed Degree Qualifications Profile • There has been a silence on the content of student learning. • Quality of a student’s education is the key to future opportunity for students and society alike. • Four strategies for raising student achievement: • Essential Learning Outcomes • High Impact Practices • Authentic Assessments • Inclusive Excellence

14. Lumina Foundation: Proposed Degree Qualifications Profile • Degree Qualifications Profile defines what US degrees at various levels (associate, bachelor and master’s ) in terms of what students know and can do with their knowledge. • Currently, standards are measured by credit-hours. • Degree profile sets a shared framework for high standards based on essential learning outcomes.

15. References • www.luminafoundation.org • ww.aacu.org • AAC&U Statement on the Lumina Foundation for Education’s Proposed Degree Qualifications Profile (January 2011)