New blanket rubric for assessing student work sounds a lot like Common Core State Standards

common-core-rubricIf you’re not familiar, Common Core State Standards (CCSS) is “a set of high-quality academic standards in mathematics and English Language Arts/literacy (ELA),” says the CCSS Initiative, with assessments that are given to students to measure their progress in these standards. Most states have signed on, with controversy. But is a new rubric the Common Core for higher ed?

68 institutions (including both 2-year and 4-year) in 9 states (Connecticut, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Utah. See: www.sheeo.org/msc for full list of participating institutions) have agreed to pilot a new approach to learning outcomes assessment, according to the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) and the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO), called Advance Learning Outcomes Assessment (MSC).

The approach, supported in its initial planning year with funds from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, will have participating institutions pilot test a cross-state and cross-institutional effort to document how well students are achieving key learning outcomes like quantitative reasoning, written communication, and critical thinking by assessing authentic student work products using a set of common rubrics.

The approach is part of AAC&U’s ongoing VALUE (Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education) initiative.

(Next page: What’s entailed)

Faculty members across the 68 institutions will be sampling and assessing students’ work and establishing the reliability and validity of cross-institutional assessment using this new approach. During its initial year, the project will be building faculty assessment capacity and collecting student work products.

The project will also be developing a web-based data platform for uploading student work samples and assessment data.

“What our faculty learn from this work will help them improve teaching and student learning and will provide valuable and defensible information to show that students are learning, and what that learning means in terms of the understanding and skills needed to succeed in life,” said George Pernsteiner, the president of SHEEO.

In its earlier phases of work, VALUE published 16 rubrics developed and tested by teams of faculty and other educational professionals that are aligned with the LEAP Essential Learning Outcomes and also with the intellectual skills highlighted in the Degree Qualifications Profile. Over 2,000 colleges and universities and community colleges in the U.S. already are using VALUE rubrics to assess student work.

“The calls are mounting daily for higher education to be able to show what students can successfully do with their learning,” said AAC&U President Carol Geary Schneider. “The Multi-State Collaborative is a very important step toward focusing assessment on the best evidence of all: the work students produce in the course of their college studies. It is exciting and inspiring to see that so many campuses want to be part of this important national study and change effort.”

(Next page: Common Core for better or worse?)

Developing common rubrics for student learning assessments certainly is a noble idea, especially with higher education increasingly coming under scrutiny for high tuition and poor job prospects for students. If higher education has a “common” standards rubric, perhaps institutions will be better able to prove their merit by holding students better accountable for what’s considered to be “quality” work.

This approach also differs from the CCSS in that it’s piloting the standards to measure their effectiveness–a step the K-12 Common Core standards didn’t take, ultimately making states wary on their true effectiveness.

However, the problem becomes standardization. Do all institutions have the same philosophy when it comes to student work? For example, would MIT understand an essay relating computer science to the novel 1984, and on the other end of the spectrum, would Kenyon College understand an experiment designed to see if new engineering methods affected students social-emotional moods?

In theory, both highly-regarded institutions have similar expectations for depth and quality of student work. However, it’s the campus culture, expertise of selected staff, and nuance of work favored by both institutions that make one more suited for ELA and one for STEM.

In other words, if all higher ed institutions can simply submit student work into a program to be graded, do institutions still have an identity?

And, in the current economic climate, should institutions retain identities, or is it more practical to have institutions as career factories?

For more information, see VALUE and Multi-State Collaborative on Learning Outcomes Assessment.

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