Earlham College | News from Public Affairs

RICHMOND, Ind. — Is an Earlham education as good as the College thinks it is, and how would it really know? With the support of a $300,000 grant split with two other liberal arts colleges, Earlham is launching a quantitative and qualitative assessment of its general education program to find some answers.

The funds come from $2 million in grants The Teagle Foundation is distributing to 50 private colleges and universities to support institutional and faculty collaboration in projects aimed at strengthening teaching and learning.

Earlham Professor of History and Associate Academic Dean Robert Southard makes a point during class. Southard is helping to direct the College’s participation in a new project, funded with a $300,000 grant from The Teagle Foundation, that looks to sharpen the picture professors and administrators at Earlham and two partner colleges are getting about actual student learning and the value added by the institutions to their students’ intellectual and personal growth.

Earlham will share its $300,000 portion with Kalamazoo (Mich.) College and Colorado College in an effort called “A Catalyst for Cognizance and Change.” In real terms that means that over the next three years the schools will gather both empirical data and anecdotal evidence into a picture of educational outcomes at the three institutions.

“Nothing has the potential to enhance the educational experience as much as a sustained assessment of how and what students learn,” says W. Robert Conner, president of the New York-based Teagle Foundation, in explaining the organization’s interest and support. Established in 1944 by Walter C. Teagle, longtime president and later chairman of Standard Oil Company (now Exxon Mobil Corporation), The Teagle Foundation seeks to support institutions of higher learning and research, among other organizations, “to advance the well-being and general good of mankind throughout the world.”

In rewarding Earlham and its partners in the new project, the foundation acknowledged that each has “a strong independent streak” marked by innovation and dedication to their educational programs. Colorado College was cited for its “adventurous spirit and unique learning opportunities;” Kalamazoo for its superior international learning programs; and Earlham for its “Quaker traditions, which guide the institution and uphold the pursuit of truth.”

Earlham has long been obsessed with measuring its educational programs. Through a host of surveys and sophisticated questionnaires directed at students and post-graduates the College is ever evaluating its curriculum and teaching strengths. Those efforts were institutionalized in 1998 with the creation of a full-time Office of Institutional Research, which collects the data and shares them with faculty and administrators.

Associate Academic Dean and Professor of History Robert Southard said that while the grant calls these measurements essential, it considers them “coarse grained” because they tend to provide only generalizations.

Through such tests as the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) “we test a large number of students as they begin college, then a significant portion of them in their senior year to get a sense of what they learned and the value of going to college,” says Southard.

However, as crucial as the resultant data are to informing and shaping Earlham’s general education efforts, they lack much “fine grained” evidence into specific teaching and learning consequences.

Take writing skills, for example. “Led by Deb Jackson (Assistant Professor of Anthropology), Earlham has developed a series of rubrics for what constitutes good collegiate writing that can be scored by outside readers,” says Southard. “With money from the grant we can look at papers and score them according to those rubrics.”

In Earlham’s case, outside faculty will read papers written by first- and second-year students in their Interpretive Practices course (the curriculum that replaced the Humanities Program two years ago). “The papers will be coded and anonymous, and the readers won’t know what grades the students received on their papers,” explains Southard. “In that way we will be able to see if there is an external verification that students are becoming better in their writing.”

In a similar fine-grained project, Professor of Biology Bill Buskirk is pre-testing and post-testing students in his EcoBio course in terms of basic quantitative skills. Using quantitative reasoning he hopes to get good numbers on how students do when they begin the course and how much they improve by the conclusion.

To gain a still clearer image of the general educational picture on campus, Earlham has begun administering the new, comprehensive Collegiate Learning Assessment test. Most first-year students were tested during New Student Orientation and the first week of classes. They will be tested again, as seniors, in the fall of 2008.

As part of its Teagle-funded assessment project, the Earlham, Colorado and Kalamazoo combine also will hold student focus groups and convene data sharing conversations to determine, according to the schools’ project summary, “the value added by our institutions to our students’ intellectual and personal growth.”

College teachers are constantly nagged, or should be, with questions about their teaching effectiveness. Course papers, examination scores and classroom participation are fundamental measurements, but they don’t completely satisfy all objective questions about learning, Southard notes.

“For example, I know that the students in my history classes are learning. I can see it, but could I prove it to outside skeptics? We want to provide that proof,” says Southard. “With what our schools can do with the Teagle assessment project we can move further from faith-based to empirically based evidence.”

Contact:
Robert Southard, associate academic dean and professor of history
765/983-1425 — E-Mail Robert