What is the Degree Qualifications Profile (DQP)?

1. What is the Degree Qualifications Profile (DQP)? 2012 Institute on Integrative Learning and the Departments July 12, 2012 Carol Geary Schneider

3. How Does the DQP Relate to AAC&U’s Vision for Liberal – and Liberating – Education?

4. Why is Lumina Field-Testing the DQP? To Bring New Currency – and New Transparency – to the Meaning of U.S. Degrees

5. To Ensure Student Readiness for 21st Century Challenges – Economic, Civic, and Personal

6. The Degree Must be More Than a Collection of Courses and Credits

7. We Need to Show What Students Can Do With Their Learning

8. Why Did AAC&U Join the DQP Effort?

9. To Close the Gap Between Aspiration and Actual Student Achievement

10. Aspiration: Higher Education Has Already Identified the Key Elements in a Contemporary Framework for Quality: • Consensus Aims and Outcomes • High Impact Practices that Foster Achievement AND Completion • Evidence on “What Works” for Underserved Students • Assessment Practices That Raise – and Reveal – the Level of Learning

11. Making Progress? What We Know About the Achievement of Liberal Education Outcomes by Ashley Finley (AAC&U, 2012)

12. Achievement The Preponderance of the Evidence – from Many Sources – Shows That Far Too Many Students are “Underachieving” on All the Outcomes Educators Endorse

13. From Making Progress? “…for six of the eleven learning outcomes measured by the Wabash study, the majority of students showed either ‘no growth or a decline’ over four years.” – page 8

14. The DQP Builds from the LEAP Consensus Aims and Outcomes – And the Desire to “Make Excellence Inclusive”

15. The DQP Combines Vision with Strategy – A Strategy For: • Moving Students’ Actual Work – and Faculty Judgment about Their Progress – to the Center of Attention • Fostering Practices that Raise Achievement • Creating Assessments Worthy of Our Mission

16. So What is the DQP? The DQP is a Framework for Learning That Focuses on Students’ Demonstrated Achievement

17. Integration and Application The Degree Profile emphasizes “the cumulative integration of learning from many sources and the application of learning in a variety of settings…” (DP, p. 2)

18. What Kinds of Integrative Learning Are Included? • Knowledge – Broad and Specialized – With Intellectual Skills • General Learning With Majors • Field-Based Learning with Academic Learning • Civic Inquiry With Academic and Field-Based Learning • Culminating Accomplishments that Integrate Learning Across Levels and Disciplines

19. Applications The Degree Profile Shifts Our Collective Attention to What Students Actually Do: Research, Projects, Papers, Performances, Creative Work… Applied Learning!

20. The DQP Asks Us to Shift from My Work – Each Course is a Silo – to OUR Work – Intentional Practices that Both Develop and Demonstrate Students’ Competence

21. The DQP Invites Faculty and Staff to Focus on… • Intentional Assignments that Develop Competence • Integrative Milestone Performances that Provide Evidence of Competence and of Students’ Ability to Tackle Complex Questions and Problems

22. Aims/Outcomes/Intentional Practices Mapped Across the Entire Curriculum • First to Final Year • General Education AND the Departments • Co-Curriculum as Well

23. Why Did We Call it a “Profile?” And What Do We Expect will Happen? • The U.S. higher education “system” is a lot more diverse than is typical elsewhere and, at least to some extent, we value this diversity. • “Profile” defines the shape and basic parameters of the outcomes statements, but not the portrait itself: • Institutions or consortia of institutions or state higher education systems can add new elements and tailor the content of the DQP statements to match their missions. • We tell them they are Kahlo, Dürer, Van Gogh, Stuart: finish the portrait, but you are confined to the same palette of active, concrete verbs!!! Clifford Adelman, Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP)

24. What Does It Mean to Be the Artist Who Turns the Profile into a Portrait? • That the DQP, as given, is a prod, a prompt, and not the last word. • Don’t agree with the territories? Change them! • Think the competences miss something? Add what you think they miss! • Don’t agree with the verbs? Change them, but make sure they describe what students are expected to do.Clifford Adelman, Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP)

25. Possible DQP Revisions • Expand the List of Intellectual Skills • Ethical Reasoning • Collaborative Problem-Solving • Expand and Clarify Three Areas of Applied Learning • Inquiry-Based Reasoning • Field-Based Learning • Civic Learning

26. We Welcome Your Feedback and Advice As We Work to Get the Profile Right!