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AALE Executive Director Michael Poliakoff spoke
at the 35th Annual Conference of the National
Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC), an organization of colleges and
universities supporting honors education, on October 20, 2000. Dr.
Poliakoff accepted an invitation to give a presentation about the use of student
learning outcomes assessment in the accreditation of liberal arts colleges.
Dr. Poliakoff began with a brief description of
the mission of the Academy as an advocate for liberal education at a time when
voices advocating increased resources for specialized career training
predominate. Raising the questions "What do we mean when we say quality in
higher education?" and "How do we measure that quality?" he used
data from recent surveys of college students to paint a striking portrait of the
weaknesses in liberal arts preparation often seen in American higher education.
His response to the first question centered on
schools providing the skills necessary for its alumni to be effective members of
society. Dr. Poliakoff pointed out that the skills most frequently sought by
companies in hiring practices, especially in the new economy where it is
expected a person will change careers many times over the course of his or her
life, are precisely those developed by a quality liberal education - critical
thinking, creativity, English language skills both spoken and written,
mathematical and scientific skills, and the ability to apply knowledge. He
pointed out how AALE's Education Standards are specifically designed to address
a school's dedication to and success with instilling these skills, and
contrasted the standards with those of our regional colleagues whose broad
missions preclude addressing such specific content issues.
In answer to the second question, Dr. Poliakoff noted the difference
between measuring basic college skills, which can be accomplished with
standardized instruments, and assessing liberal arts effectiveness, which
requires more sophisticated methods. Dr. Poliakoff praised the efforts of
several schools for their own pursuits of effective assessment procedures,
including South Dakota's public universities for the courage they have shown in
using objective tests of college skills. But he suggested the need to go
further than objective tests alone, citing Truman State's accomplishments with
more involved assessment procedures. Dr. Poliakoff articulated the guiding
principle that a fully effective assessment must make the intellectual virtues
or attributes which are central to the liberal arts the focal point of the
assessment process. Signs of a successful program are a clear sense of
what it means to be a student and graduate of the institution, a reflective
intellectual community, and the absence of academic turf wars.
Dr. Poliakoff proceeded to describe AALE's recent
efforts in the use of student learning outcomes assessment, and drew on AALE's
experience at Tusculum College, the test subject for the Academy's new
Educational Effectiveness Protocols, to illustrate one possible way of
overcoming the barriers to strong educational self-assessment. These new
protocols were developed over the past few years with generous support from the
Pew Charitable Trusts and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Dr.
Poliakoff stressed that the method used at Tusculum to document and archive
student learning outcomes is but one of several effective assessment procedures,
and that from the range of visions and valid assessment techniques schools would
be able to find a method appropriate to their own individual missions. He
cautioned that initiating self-assessment efforts might be a daunting task, but
that schools would find it well worth the effort once they have begun to
establish a "culture of evidence" for their educational effectiveness
- as he put it, these programs "seem to run themselves" once they are
established.
Dr. Poliakoff's speech was well received by the attendees, and it was followed
by a fruitful question and answer session. The Academy is pleased to have
been represented at the NCHC Annual Conference both through Dr. Poliakoff's
presentation and through its booth at the Idea Exchange, and looks forward to
fruitful relationships with NCHC and its constituent organizations. For more
information on AALE's Educational Effectiveness Protocols, go to AALE's "A
New Model for Accreditation in the Liberal Arts," in Publications, where there is
an overview of the project and where the document itself is available for both
printable download and on-screen viewing in PDF format. The Protocols are also
incorporated into the 2001 revisions of AALE's accreditation Standards and
Criteria for both institutions and programs; go to our Accreditation
page for that series of documents.
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