Connecting Completion and Quality for Student Success Illinois Performance Funding Steering Committee Chicago, IL November 13, 2013 Carol Geary Schneider

Overview  Connecting Completion and Quality – The Challenge and the Opportunity  Making Quality a Priority– the Resources in Hand  High Impact Practices and Student Success

Completion and Quality  Metrics for Completion – the Credit Hour  Needed Metrics for Quality – “Emerging”  What We Need: A New Framework for Quality Assurance That Integrates Quality with Completion

Making Quality a Priority…

…Key Elements in a 21 st Century Vision for High- Quality Learning  Consensus on Aims and Learning Outcomes  Practices that Foster Achievement AND Completion  Evidence on “What Works” for Underserved Students  Assessments that Deepen—and Demonstrate— the Level of Students’ Learning

Consensus Aims and Outcomes There is very broad agreement across all parts of higher education – 2 year, 4 year, public and private – on the learning and skills students need most (See handouts)

See Learning and Assessment: Trends in Undergraduate Education—A Survey Among Members of the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U and Hart Research Associates, 2009) for more information.

Employers Strongly Endorse the Aims and Outcomes Educators Prize And They Urge New Effort to Help All Students Achieve Them (See handouts)

See Raising the Bar: Employers’ Views on College Learning in the Wake of the Economic Downturn (AAC&U and Hart Research Associates, 2010) and It Takes More Than a Major: Employer Priorities for College Learning and Student Success (AAC&U and Hart Research Associates, 2013) for more information.

Educator and Employer Views Reflect Trends in the Economy

Employer Views Reflect Economic Trends Source: Dancing with Robots: Human Skills for Computerized Work, by Frank Levy and Richard J. Murnane. Third Way, 2013.

What Economists Say “Human work will increasingly shift toward two kinds of tasks: solving problems for which standard operating procedures do not currently exist, and working with new information—acquiring it, making sense of it, communicating it to others….today, work that consists of following clearly specified directions is increasingly being carried out by computers and workers in lower- wage countries. The remaining jobs that pay enough to support families require a deeper level of knowledge and the skills to apply it.” Frank Levy and Richard Murnane, “Dancing with Robots” (2013)

The LEAP Outcomes Build Knowledge and Capacities Necessary to an Innovation- Fueled Economy—and to the Global Commons as Well

If These Are the Goals, How Are Students Doing?

The Preponderance of the Evidence Shows That Students Are Underachieving on Essential Learning Outcomes The Quality Challenge

As We Know from Earlier Hart Research Surveys and Myriad Other Studies, Many Employers Report that Too Many Graduates Fall Short on Key Learning Outcomes, such as…  Critical Thinking  Writing  Teamwork and Collaboration  Global Knowledge  STEM Knowledge

How Do We Help Students Achieve the Expected Learning?

The Key Elements in a 21 st Century Vision for High- Quality Learning  The Consensus on Aims and Learning Outcomes  Practices that Foster Achievement AND Completion  Evidence on “What Works” for Underserved Students  Assessments that Deepen—and Demonstrate— the Level of Learning

Practices That Foster Achievement AND Completion, Especially for Underserved Students

The Central Role of High Impact Practices (HIPs)  First-Year Seminars and Experiences  Common Intellectual Experiences  Learning Communities  Writing-Intensive Courses  Collaborative Assignments and Projects  Undergraduate Research  Diversity/Global Learning  Service Learning, Community-Based Learning  Internships  Capstone Courses and Projects

High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter, by George D. Kuh (AAC&U, 2008)

Ensuring Quality & Taking High-Impact Practices to Scale, by George D. Kuh and Ken O’Donnell (AAC&U, 2013)

When Students are Engaged in High Impact Practices, They Are  More likely to complete  More likely to achieve intended outcomes  With particular benefit for underserved students

What the HIPs Evidence Also Shows - The Students Who Could Benefit Most Are Least Likely to Participate in HIPs

How Campuses Are Using the HIPs Evidence They’re Mapping High Impact Practices Across the Required Curriculum

The Key Elements in a 21 st Century Vision for High- Quality Learning  The Consensus on Aims and Learning Outcomes  Practices that Foster Achievement AND Completion  Evidence on “What Works” for Underserved Students  Assessments that Deepen—and Demonstrate— the Level of Learning

Authentic Assessments  Students’ Actual Work is the Most Important Evidence We Have About Whether They Can Integrate and Apply Their Knowledge to New Challenges  HIPs Reveal What Students Can Really Do

This is the Core Point in the LEAP VALUE Approach to Quality Purposeful, Guided Practice is the Key to Persistence, Learning, and Assessment

Implications for Policy  Ask Campuses to Track and Report Student Participation in HIPs;  Disaggregate the Data to Assess Equity in HIPs Participation

Implications for Policy  Student Work Produced in HIPs Can Be Assessed for Evidence of Key Learning Outcomes  Watch AAC&U”s VALUE Initiative for Quality Assurance Practices and Protocols That Any State or Campus Can Use