Project Description The Hewlett grant helped fund 24 faculty at Michigan State University to mobilize campus expertise, strengthen faculty culture and build capacity to assess student learning outcomes, and initiate systematic classroom-embedded assessment of student learning outcomes in Integrative Studies, the universitys liberal general education program. MSU has a distinctive institutional model for delivering general education courses and also a consensus about key purposes and academic goals in general education that permits us to effectively assess student-learning outcomes. Our consensus about purposes and academic goals in general education was forged in conversations over 18 months in an institute that included faculty and administrators. We agreed that assessing student outcomes will allow us to better communicate our purposes and goals to all stakeholders in general education including faculty, faculty colleagues, advisors, and, most importantly, students. Our institutional model which draws faculty from disciplinary departments of our three core colleges, Arts & letters, Social Science and Natural Science, to teach courses in three Centers for Integrative Studies, allows us to restrict general education offerings to courses specifically designed to address these goals and purposes. Assessment drives our conversations about the extent to which our general education program fulfills the goals and purposes we have articulated.##

(Photos above and below.) Scenes from a faculty workshop where project participants discuss assessment strategies and their perceived relationship to teaching and learning.

Responses to the question "How often do I use data to make instructional decisions?" yields interesting findings on this chart prepared by MSU faculty during the workshop.

MSU Project Highlights We were not fully aware, when we proposed our project to the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation that we were proposing to change significantly the culture of teaching and learning at Michigan State University. Pervasive, faculty driven assessment of student learning outcomes is a cultural change and one that we have affected at our university. We came together as faculty with a shared concern for our students. Today we represent a community confident that we know how to find evidence of our students progress and change the ways we teach in response to that evidence. Just as the knowledge our students gain in general education empowers them, we have been empowered by our better understanding of their learning. Because we were novices in assessment we mobilized campus expertise and brought in outside experts who contributed greatly to the discussion. Outside experts were most valuable in the early stages because they offered assurance that faculty at other campuses have successfully engaged in similar process. However, we found experts on our own campus to provide the most useful guidance and stimulation. Our in-house experts understand our particular academic culture. Also, they were excited to ply their tools in their home institution. These experts, like many of us, have the experience of being a prophet in any other land. Indeed, this sense of being valued more outside ones institution is a by-product of faculty specialization which leads to a sense of community focused on academic specialty rather than academic department, college or university. With attention focused on expert faculty in our institution, we began to build a sense of community and ability within Integrative Studies. The faculty participants shared a commitment to teaching but little else. They were only marginally aware of general education offerings outside their college. Early in the project, many of them expressed a feeling of professional isolation and questioned their effectiveness. It became apparent that the one or two day faculty development workshops on teaching and learning that Michigan State supports had not provided an adequate framework for building a professional community of teacher scholars on our campus. A real sense of community is built over months and years, not days. Faculty development was a critical component of the project. A barrier to assessment was the unspoken sense that many of us were failing to help students progress toward some of the ineffable goals of general education. Workshops on assessment techniques allowed us to articulate standards based on student work and workshops on pedagogy helped us gain confidence in our ability to guide our students progressing toward these goals. Project highlights continued next column.

Into Bondage, the 1936 painting by Aaron Douglas (Corcoran Gallery of Art) is an assessment prompt for measuring student understanding of the themes of the Harlem rennaissance in an Integrative Studies-Arts & Humanities course. (Details below.)

The Many Faces of Assessment We employ a wide range of assessment strategies and instruments because faculty interests in student learning are so varied. Some are interested in measuring students mastery of content. Some are interested in students performance at various cognitive levels (e.g. Blooms taxonomy). Some are interested in how teaching assistants work with our students and some are interested in how students learn. We have purposefully agreed to use many assessment instruments and strategies because we believe faculty interest is the only force that will sustain meaningful assessment of student learning. Four examples of assessment strategies and instruments follow:

EXAMPLE 1 Assessment in Integrative Studies-Arts & Humanities Ken Waltzer, Director of the Center for Integrative Studies, Arts & Humanities wants evidence of student learning in a large class, United States & the World, taught by 40 graduate assistants in sections of 40-50 students. Ken worked with 7 faculty of record and 10 graduate teaching assistants to develop a common final exam that could also serve as an effective instrument for assessing student learning. One key to developing the instrument was agreement that questions should be equally distributed in a matrix based on content and cognitive levels. Click here to see example questions from this assessment and inferences drawn from patterns of student responses.

EXAMPLE 2 Assessment in Integrative Studies-Social Science Many faculty want to know how much students learn. The Geography of Change is an Integrative Studies-Social Science class that uses pre- and post-test assessment strategy. Faculty evaluate three categories of knowledge: factual knowledge about the world, understanding concepts, and relationships and analysis. Click here to see test examples that gauge learning in three categories of knowledge.

Assessment Examples 3 and 4 continued middle next column.

More Project Highlights Faculty construct their own assessment instruments based on their particular questions about student learning. Broadly focused instruments generally help us understand what students are learning. Narrowly focused instruments help us understand why students are progressing toward some learning outcome goals and not others. We see assessment of student learning outcomes as an iterative process that must address both questions. The community we have formed must progress to survive, particularly in these times of financial stress on higher education. We intend to grow stronger with our new sense of purpose and ability.## Testing&Testing

"MSU has a distinctive institutional model for delivering general education courses and also a consensus about key purposes and academic goals in general education that permits us to effectively assess student-learning outcomes."

Impact Beyond the Project The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (Carnegie Foundation) and the Association of American Colleges and Universities selected members of our group to participate in a new national project, Integrative Learning: Opportunities to Connect. During this three-year project, the two organizations will work with us to develop and assess better models and strategies to help students pursue integrative learning. Helping students develop their abilities to integrate knowledge will nurture the habits of mind that prepare them to make informed personal, professional, and civic decisions throughout their lives. This project is builds on the expertise we developed and will foster growth of our community. Project impact continued top next column.

"We were not fully aware, when we proposed our project to the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation that we were proposing to change significantly the culture of teaching and learning at Michigan State University."

Project Impact Continued Based on our clarity of goals for student learning and commitment to assessing progress toward these goals, Integrative Studies plays a central role in the Michigan State University-Carnegie Corporation collaborative project Teachers for a New Era. The goal for Teachers for a New Era is to establish nationally recognized "exemplars" of outstanding teacher preparation. MSU's approach focuses on content knowledge and habits of mind would-be teachers need to improve their pupils learning. Many of the goals for student learning outcomes in Integrative Studies are consistent with knowledge goals for would-be teachers. MSU's Lilly Fellows Program provides an annual year-long fellowship for six junior faculty members. Lilly Fellows work with a senior faculty mentor on a project designed to enhance the fellows' teaching skills. For the next three years there will be three additional Lilly Fellows who will work on the scholarship of teaching and learning in Integrative Studies with emphasis on student learning outcomes. Participants from our Hewlett project will serve as mentors and fellows will become members of our community. MSU's Center for Scholarship of Teaching was developed to support a community of scholars interested in the practice of teaching and its effects on student learning. To foster that interest at MSU, the Center sponsors a seminar series, Teaching Across the University. This series provides a venue for faculty in our project to present their work to the university community. It also helps move the conversation about evidence of student learning from general education into the broader university.##

Assessment Examples Continued

EXAMPLE 3 Assessing Learning from Visual Representations of Concepts Faculty teaching Geology of the Human Environment are working to understand how students learn from prototypical representations of concepts. We realized that we use prototypical representations frequently but have paid little attention to how students learn from these representations. Part of our investigation has involved testing students' ability to visualize three-dimensional objects (see illustration below) and looking for relationships of visual understanding with their ability to understand diagrams that depict important concepts. Click here to see examples of questions that assess students' understanding of standard representations.

On the figure above X has been rotated to Y as A has been rotated to ___ . Questions like the one above help MSU faculty understand how students learn from prototypical representations of concepts. (See Assessment Example 3 above.)

EXAMPLE 4 Rubrics for Students and TAs Approximately 2000 students per year are enrolled in Integrative Studies Biology lab. Many of the lab sections are taught by graduate teaching assistants who have little or no prior teaching experience. We found rubrics are as important for teaching assistant training and preparation as they are for student learning and assessment. While common in the K-12 arena, grading with rubrics was almost non-existent in the core colleges. The real breakthrough in our view of rubrics came from faculty thinking not about their own grading but about graduate teaching assistants' grading. An added incentive was the realization that when students are provided scoring rubrics with an assignment, the quality of their work improves dramatically.## Click here to see a sample essay and the scoring rubric.

In an Integrative Studies-Biology course a faculty member explains a rubric to two graduate teaching assistants. While common in K-12 classrooms, grading with rubrics was almost non-existent in the core colleges at Michigan State. (See Assessment Example 4 above.)