Home > Blogs + Podcasts > The Teagle Liblog

The Teagle Liblog

November 17, 2008

Does it Really Make a Difference to Students?
By Bob Connor, The Teagle Foundation

If you are in the foundation business and committed to the liberal education of undergraduates—as we at Teagle are—you wonder sometimes whether your grants are making a difference to students. That may be especially true when the grants concern high falutin’ but abstract sounding things like “systematic improvement of student learning,” “value added assessment,” or “using evidence to strengthen undergraduate education.”

Once in a while you get a break-through.

We asked Laura Palucki Blake of Agnes Scott College whether Teagle support for a first year seminar program at the college was having any detectable effects on student learning. We knew that faculty there had developed a “rubric” (a systematic set of agreed-upon grading criteria) and had critiqued many student papers using it. But did it make a difference?

Here’s Laura’s answer:

I actually had a conversation with Assistant Professor of Art Katherine Smith about this relatively recently, and she had the chance to go back and talk with the rest of the art and art history department about the changes they have seen in their students. Seventy-five percent of full-time tenure track faculty members in art and art history have taken part in reading First Year Seminar [FYS] papers … They have also actively shared the rubrics … with their students to open a dialogue about expectations for written and oral communication, and to provide a common language for conversation about projects. Lastly, they have also reshaped their senior capstone course into a culminating conversation.

The faculty agreed that they all have noticed a difference in the students since using the rubrics (both for writing and oral communication)…, and in adapting them for their courses. There were four changes they saw:

1) … Greater sophistication, elegance, clarity of work, and professionalism were evident [among seniors].

2) Students are [now] more likely to engage each other. There is an increase in intellectual discourse … between students. Students are responding to each other.

3) Students are more open to having conversations about their projects, and in getting concrete feedback from both their peers and their instructors.

4) Students are having these conversations at earlier levels in their academic career. Specifically in studio art, students are considering how work they are doing in lower level courses can be put together in their senior capstone, and anticipating how their work can be useful beyond Agnes Scott College. They are able to articulate earlier their goals as a student….

I like the specificity of this response; it helps me see how skilled faculty can turn some rather abstract principles into really powerful learning experiences.

Email This Article | Subscribe to E-Updates

Post Your Comments