Academic Programs and Students



Overview

Project Area 5.3 of the National Center for Postsecondary Improvement (NCPI) was created to examine student and faculty experiences, perceptions of the environment, and practices that are related to undergraduate teaching, learning, and assessment activities. This will be accomplished by linking findings through two approaches: 1) The review and analysis of existing national data sets and the development of a research design to anayze data; and 2) The evaluation of selected reform and innovation practices related to teaching, learning, and assessment.

Approach 1: Meta-data Review of Student and Faculty Assessment Data. Existing data resources are being analyzed to discover their utility in understanding: how curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment influence student performance, cognitive, and affective outcomes; student experiences inside and outside the classroom; and student self-concept, aspiration, and level of engagement.

Like other Research Projects in Project Area Five, we are making use of existing national databases as well as collecting new data that will shed light on a variety of faculty and student issues that influence undergraduate experiences and outcomes. The scope of the project encompasses multi-institutional analysis of longitudinal data, cross-sectional data on current practices that will be linked with student and faculty data, as well as campus case studies.

We are reviewing data sets by focusing on data collection methods. We are also focusing on the existing overlap among current data resources and the lack of currently collected data in key areas which hinder our ability to understand and improve teaching and learning activities. Major strengths and weaknesses of the national data bases will be identified and recommendations will be made with regard to future data collection that can build upon national, state-level, and discipline-associated data collection efforts. In addition to examining the individual and institutional factors that promote student learning, a particularly exciting possibility is the creation of "new" data bases by merging information from data generated from Research Projects 5.1 and 5.2 data collection efforts and linking these with existing national data.

Approach 2 : Reform and Innovation in Teaching, Learning, and Assessment Practices. Evaluation of selected reforms and innovation projects: studying the climate for reform in undergraduate education. We are documenting current reforms and innovation movements in the country in order to examine:

1. How change or innovations are brought about, identifying key actors and agencies taking the lead or facilitating these reforms.

2. How institutions have come to identify major problems in the way teaching and learning take place, and the fundamental changes occurring in the ways that undergraduates are taught.

3. How assessment, student diversity, and use of new technology are incorporated in the current innovation movements.

While innovations in teaching and learning are occurring across the country within postsecondary education, we will be selecting a few institutions whose strategies hold promise for broad adoption across the diversity of institutions in higher education. This study of current undergraduate improvement efforts will provide information on how the many aspects of teaching, learning, and assessment work in tandem to produce results.

Our intent is to develop case studies of these key institutions that exemplify current reform movements and report details of these promising practices including recommended indicators of monitoring student progress. These indicators will reflect institutional efforts to gauge the impact of changing educational practices in higher education.

A survey instrument for students and faculty will be developed in conjunction with Research 5.2, Institutional Studies, based on results obtained from the analysis of both existing data and case-study collections. These qualitative and quantitative data on students and faculty will be linked with information from Projects 5.1 and 5.2 to present a coherent portrait of our knowledge base and changing practices in teaching, learning, and assessment that affects students, faculty and academic programs.



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