Grants in Higher Education

TEAGLE FOUNDATION GRANTS IN HIGHER EDUCATION

ADDITIONAL GRANTS IN OUTCOMES AND ASSESSMENT

Click here for other projects in Outcomes and Assessment.

May 2010

Council for Aid to Education
Faculty Scholars / Critical Think Tank
Project Leader: Marc Chun

$99,760 over 18 months to recruit and train an initial cadre of faculty scholars to be experts on the use of "performance tasks" as a way to connect teaching, learning, and assessment with respect to the development of students' critical thinking and other higher order thinking skills. The faculty scholars will comprise the "Critical Thinking Tank" and will serve as trainers for the CLA Performance Task Academies, as well as form consulting teams to colleges and universities that seek to improve student learning.

Social Science Research Council
Communication Plan for Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses
Project Leaders: Richard Arum (SSRC and New York University) and Josipa Roksa (University of Virginia)

$25,393 over 12 months to develop and implement a communication and dissemination plan for Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, which documents and analyzes the results of the CLA Longitudinal Project. (The Foundation provided earlier grant support for this research project.)

Wabash College (Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts)
The Teagle Assessment Scholar Development Program
Project Leader: Charles Blaich

$299,632 over 36 months to enhance the process by which new Teagle Assessment Scholars are identified and to strengthen the training of the Scholars. The Teagle Assessment Scholars program was initially supported with a 2006 grant from the Foundation.

November 2009

Sarah Lawrence College
Sarah Lawrence Individual Direct Evaluation (planning grant)
Project Leader: Jerrilyn Dodds

$25,000 over 12 months to develop instruments and a protocol for the direct assessment of student learning outcomes at Sarah Lawrence College.

May 2009

New Leadership Alliance for Student Learning and Accountability | Organization website
Project Leader: David Paris

$150,000 over 36 months to support a national effort by organizations and groups representing and supporting higher education in the assessment of, and accountability for, student learning outcomes—in order to improve student learning. One major goal of the "Alliance" is to encourage institutions to: 1) set forth clear and ambitious goals for learning, 2) gather evidence about how well their students are achieving those goals, and 3) ensure that the institutions use the resulting information to improve their programs. A second goal is to promote good communication within the higher education community and to the general public about this work.

November 2008

Augustana College, Allegheny College, College of Wooster, and Washington College
The Senior Capstone: Tranformative Experiences in the Liberal Arts | Project website
Project Leader: Timothy Schermer

$284,960 over 42 months to study the practices and measure selected outcomes of capstone programs at three liberal arts colleges. This project was developed with a planning grant from the Teagle Foundation.

Hamilton College
Creating the Alliance for New Leadership for Student Learning and Accountability (planning grant)
Project Leader: David Paris

$84,000 over 6 months to create a national alliance of higher education leaders that will coordinate, communicate, and advance assessment for the improvement of student learning.

Social Science Research Council
The Patterns and Consequences of Variation in Cognitive Growth in Higher Education as Measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment | Project Website
Project Leader: Richard Arum

$150,000 over 36 months to investigate how factors of disadvantage—socioeconomic background, race and ethnicity, high school attended, and language spoken at home—affect the way students learn through four years of college and beyond, as measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Indiana University | Project Website
Making Learning Outcomes Usable and Transparent: Mapping the Territory, Documenting the Journey
Project Leaders: Stanley Ikenberry (University of Illinois) and George Kuh (Indiana University)

$150,000 over 36 months to create a national coalition for learning outcomes assessment that will compile and continuously update a comprehensive inventory of practices about how colleges and universities collect, report, and use institution- and student-level measures to improve learning and performance.

May 2008

Lawrence University, College of Wooster, and Williams College
Researching assessment methods in tutorial education
Project Leaders: Robert Beck and William Skinner

$94,700 over 24 months to develop and test a method for the formative and summative assessment of tutorial education in a consortium of three liberal arts colleges. Click here for Co-PI Robert Beck's essay, "The Independent Thinker: Assessing Student Outcomes in Tutorial Education."

February 2008

The College of Wooster, Allegheny College, Augustana College, and Washington College
Capstone Research Experiences in the Liberal Arts: An Assessment of Student Learning Outcomes (Planning Grant)
Project Leader: Simon Gray

$15,000 over 7 months. Prompted by the growing belief in American higher education that undergraduate research (UR) is an especially rewarding form of learning, along with the sense that assessment studies of such programs tend to be discipline-specific (e.g. natural and life sciences, mathematics, engineering) and limited to programs that involve only a small number of undergraduates, these four liberal arts colleges (all of which already do, or will soon require a UR capstone project of all its seniors) will begin to plan a rigorous assessment of the value of UR experiences for all students. Aiming to get beyond the anecdotal evidence they currently have, the colleges' intent for this grant is to design a multi-year research project on the impact of UR on student learning, driven by three central questions: What value does the capstone UR experience add to a liberal arts degree? What kinds of programs yield the greatest gains for students? How do these gains relate to the broadly defined objectives of a liberal arts education? The planning group will consist of three people from each college (chief academic officer, an administrator responsible for assessment and/or institutional research, and a faculty representative), along with one or two consultants. The project PI will develop for the group a reading list focusing on UR, faculty mentoring, life-long learning, and liberal arts education, while each institution will create an inventory checklist that includes components, characteristics, and resources related to the capstone research program on their campus. The group will meet in summer 2008 for a three-day workshop to review inventory findings, focus the research questions, identify research goals, discuss and specify a set of outcomes, and determine a methodology for the project.

Wabash College (The Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts)
Using the Wabash National Study to Promote Assessment and Improvements in Student Learning
Project Leader: Charles Blaich

$394,500 over 63 months. The Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts (CILA) at Wabash College administers a major longitudinal research study—the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education—to "investigate critical factors that affect the outcomes of liberal arts education" and to "help colleges and universities improve student learning and enhance the educational impact of their programs" (CILA website). Twenty-six institutions have to date been involved in the study which has produced high-quality data for their campuses. Simply having such data, however, does not automatically lead to educational change; often, campuses are unable to move from gathering evidence to gathering and using evidence to make changes that improve student learning. CILA proposes to address this issue by creating a national model for how institutions participating in the Study can (1) gather evidence; (2) use that evidence to make changes; and (3) assess the impact of those changes. Participating campuses will be asked to: Review the outcomes measured by the Study and indicate those in which they would like to improve; Commit to administering the Study and some supplementary materials, to attending meetings and activities that would bring together study participants, and to two site visits by CILA staff and Teagle Assessment Scholars over the life of the project; Commit to a total of $10,000 in the third and fourth year of the project to follow up on findings from the Study, with faculty development of some other process that is aimed at increasing the frequency of effective teaching practices and conditions. At the conclusion of the project, CILA staff and Teagle Assessment Scholars will review and evaluate the institutional change programs in light of the data to determine which programs succeeded and which did not, and what qualities predicted these paths. CILA aims to sustain the model for working with institutions beyond the grant period, and will develop the infrastructure to be able to add 15 institutions to the Study every two years.

November 2007

Council for Aid to Education
CLA in the Classroom
Project Leader: Mark Chun

$80,000 over 6 months. Developed by the Council for Aid to Education (CAE), the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) measures the value added by a given institution to their students' competence in higher order skills of critical thinking, analytical reasoning, problem solving, and written communication. That the CLA's primary unit of analysis is the institution, and that the test provides holistic scores based on an intertwined range of learning outcomes noted above, has made it challenging to use test results to improve teaching and learning in individual classrooms. CAE seeks to address this issue through their new initiative, CLA in the Classroom. This program will give faculty an opportunity to use selected components of the CLA in their classrooms with the goal of strengthening student work in the areas measured by the test. They will be provided with guidelines for administering and scoring the CLA component, as well as guidelines for analyzing the results in ways that illuminate why students performed the way they did, how to think about the CLA in light of other student assignments, and how to lead a discussion about learning these kinds of skills. The Foundation will support a portion of the development of CLA in the Classroom, including: Field testing at 5-7 institutions which will be selected to maximize the variation of classroom settings. Institution type, class size, student population, and academic discipline will factor into their selection; Focus groups with students and faculty to see what they got out of the experience. Administrators will also be consulted to learn how CLA in the Classroom might be taken to scale on their campus, how CLA in the Classroom can be used to complement institutional use of CLA, and what research studies can be done using institutional results of CLA. Lastly, CLA staff will work with faculty to explore what it would take to develop their own performance tasks for their classrooms; Publicity of the program; Workshops for individual faculty to show them how to use CLA in the Classroom materials.

Vanderbilt University
Double Majors and Creativity: Influences, Interactions, and Impacts
Project Leaders: Steven Tepper and Richard Pitt

$194,724 over 36 months. Building on the work completed with a 2006 Teagle grant which focused on the question of assessing the "creative campus" (a vision of college campuses as creative environments that encourage collaboration, interdisciplinary exchange, risk-taking, and cultural vibrancy), this project will explore the relationship between creativity on campus and higher education's increasing interest in interdisciplinarity, especially as it is manifested in double majoring. Guiding this study is this overarching concern: "With respect to creativity and a liberal education, what is the value added of graduating with two majors?" The principal investigators of this project, sociologists Steven J. Tepper and Richard Pitt of Vanderbilt, contend that very little work has been done in recent years on the rising trend of double majors, and especially on its benefits and drawbacks. They will explore the choice and impact of different curricular pathways—with an emphasis on the differences among a variety of possible college major combinations—among undergraduate students at four comprehensive institutions and six liberal arts colleges. A web-based survey will be used as the principal tool for gathering information from approximately 700 undergraduate students. The survey will capture data on student demographics, academic choices, and an understanding of their creativity and innovation. It will be administrated to a stratified random sample of students, including those with a single major, those who are double majoring in two "non-creative" fields, and those who are double majoring in one "non-creative field" and one "creative" field. (A "creative" major is one that possesses a critical mass of creative attributes from a total group of fourteen.) Data analysis will proceed in the following ways: Examine information about majors in conjunction with self-reported transcript data to determine if different profiles are correlated with academic success, breadth of curricular choices, and depth of "professionalization" in courses. Document what types of students major in what types of fields and to what effect. Controlling for certain background characteristics (like family background, dispositions and interests), the study will seek to identify detectable differences in the college experience for those students who stretch themselves across different domains of knowledge. Study the effect of double majoring at a liberal arts college in relation to the effect of double majoring at a comprehensive institution. Relate data on majors to the survey data on creativity to "determine correlations between the combinations of majors and students' innovativeness both in and out of the classroom." The investigators will follow up data analysis with group interviews, or small structured discussions. Project outcomes will be presented at meetings and conferences, published in journals of sociology and education, and presented in a white paper written for the foundation.

May 2006

Wabash College (Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts)
Leveraging Institutional Success to Strengthen Assessment at Liberal Arts Colleges
Project Leaders: Charles Blaich and Steven Weisler

$300,000 over 36 months. Responding to pressures for the assessment of undergraduate teaching and learning, and recognizing the value—and also the limits— of a "one sized fits all" approach, the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts proposes to establish a national assessment support program for liberal arts colleges that combines the expertise of Teagle's value-added assessment collaboratives and the Center's programs. Speakers, site visit teams, and institutional retreats are among the array of customized services the Center will offer that will help create a foundation for assessment at liberal arts colleges. Aiming to become the "go-to" place for assessment support, the Center believes that colleges—with their size, simplicity, and missions—are optimal environments for good assessment, and that they can use assessment to strengthen their impact on teaching and learning.

Vanderbilt University (Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy)
Creativity, the Arts, and Higher Education: Exploring How the Arts Stimulate Creativity, Engagement, and Learning on College Campuses
Project Leader: Steven Tepper

$25,000 over 12 months. Nationally, there has been a quiet but persistent effort to increase the "creative" capacity of university campuses by investing in the arts, and by building centers and programs that connect creative people working across disciplines. University leaders have recognized that fostering a lively creative campus is essential in order to attract and retain the best students and to prepare those students to thrive in an economy that increasingly relies on intellectual property and creative content. One way to foster creativity is to invest in the arts; in doing so, higher education institutions, collectively, have become the single biggest patron of the arts in America—as commissioners of new work, as employers of arts faculty, as training institutions for professional artists, as stewards of art collections, and as presenters of the performing arts. But in spite of these investments and the sheer quantity of our creative assets, universities and colleges have not looked systematically at the connection between a lively artistic scene, creativity more generally, and other important institutional outcomes. To fill this gap, Vanderbilt University will host a research conference in fall 2006. The conference will feature five working groups, each comprised of scholars—primarily social scientists—from a variety of disciplines. Each working group will examine a separate theme—the role of art in fostering social capital and cosmopolitanism on campus; the link between student engagement and cultural participation; the economic dimensions (impact and costs) of university and college support for the arts; methods for mapping the creative campus; and strategies for measuring creativity on campus and assessing how the arts add value to colleges and universities. A planning grant from the Teagle Foundation will support the meeting of this last working group as it seeks to determine whether further assessment work in this area should be done. The research conference will inform a report that outlines the most promising areas for future research, highlighting innovative methodologies and identifying opportunities for collaboration across institutions. In particular, this report will emphasize possible strategies for assessment—including addressing such questions as: How would you measure creativity and artistic vitality on a college campus? How would you assess the impact of the arts on both (1) recognized educational outcomes (retention, GPA, analytical reasoning) and (2) more elusive outcomes (curiosity, creativity, passion)? How might we compare campuses in order to understand how the arts create "value" across different institutions, where goals, shared values, organizational structure and available resources vary greatly? And, finally, how might university leaders compare results over time on their own campuses in order to track the gains from investments in creativity and the arts?

November 2005

The Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media
A Primer on Value-Added Assessment
Project Leader: Gene Maeroff

$40,000 over 12 months. The Hechinger Institute will write a primer on the importance of value-added assessment for higher education, presenting reporters with a guide to current thought on this issue, prompting them to think about higher education through a lens that makes questions of learning outcomes loom large and ultimately to adopt a fresh mindset when looking at higher education. Affiliated with Columbia University Teachers College, The Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media is devoted to the professional development of working journalists involved in all phases of covering education. Journalists at major newspapers across the country—including the Boston Globe, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Dallas Morning News, the Chicago Tribune, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch—attend the institute’s seminars and read the “primers” that they develop on key topics in higher education. Proposed sections of the primer include: A discussion to reframe journalists’ approach to higher education so that they consider assessment and outcomes. What is happening around the country as supporters of assessment and outcomes try to move colleges and universities forward. A discussion of the difficulties of gauging what and how students learn in a variety of disciplines. Experience of journalists who have tried to pursue this sort of coverage. Specific guidance to help journalists move into this area of coverage and to overcome the difficulties. Contact information for journalists so that they can be in touch with experts to help them cover this story. In preparing the primer, the Institute will build on the Foundation’s work on value-added assessment, though sources of information will of course range beyond the Foundation itself. Once the primer is published, the Institute will follow up with journalists to determine who has used the primer, how, and in what stories.