VALUE: Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education

Overview As part of AAC&Us Liberal Education and Americas Promise (LEAP) initiative, the VALUE project seeks to contribute to the national dialogue on assessment of college student learning. With support from the State Farm Companies Foundation and the Fund for the Improvement of PostSecondary Education (FIPSE), the VALUE project builds on a philosophy of learning assessment that privileges authentic assessment of student work and shared understanding of student learning outcomes on campuses over reliance on standardized tests administered to samples of students outside of their required courses. The result of this philosophy has been the collaborative development of 15 rubrics by teams of faculty and academic professionals on campuses from across the country. Assessing Outcomes and Improving Achievement: Tips and Tools for Using Rubrics, Electronic Portfolios and Student Success: Effectiveness, Efficiency, and Learning and the VALUE issue of Peer Review - Assessing Learning Outcomes: Lessons from AAC&U's VALUE Project - are now available.

Current Project Activities

VALUE Rubric Reliability Study: Efforts are currently underway to establish reliability measures for select VALUE rubrics. Faculty volunteers from across traditional disciplinary areas scored student work samples. Reliability scores are being developed to assess the degree of shared understanding of rubrics across and within disciplinary areas. Collaborative on Authentic Assessment of Learning (CAAL): CAAL is currently being developed to provide a virtual community where institutions can upload, share, and discuss their campus assessment results using the VALUE rubrics. This collaboration among e-portfolio vendors and campuses is intended to expand communication across campuses regarding common instruments, compelling findings, potential benchmarks for student success, and best practices of assessment using rubrics and e-portfolios. Using the VALUE Rubrics to Communicate Effective Assessment of General Education: AAC&U, in conjunction with campuses, continues to identify existing designs and to develop interactive and userfriendly guides for implementing and communicating the results of using VALUE rubrics for the assessment of general education programs. Drawing primarily from an e-portfolio platform, these online tools will demonstrate how to sample student e-portfolio work, criteria for selecting appropriate rubrics and their application, and effective strategies for communicating results to various stakeholder groups both on and off campus. See videos and other resources from AAC&U's 2011 e-Portfolio Forum here.

VALUE assumes that:

to achieve a high-quality education for all students, valid assessment data are needed to guide planning, teaching, and improvement; colleges and universities seek to foster and assess numerous essential learning outcomes beyond those addressed by currently available standardized tests; learning develops over time and should become more complex and sophisticated as students move through their curricular and cocurricular educational pathways toward a degree; good practice in assessment requires multiple assessments, over time; well-planned electronic portfolios provide opportunities to collect data from multiple assessments across a broad range of learning outcomes while guiding student learning and building self-assessment capabilities;

e-portfolios and assessment of work in them can inform programs and institutions on progress in achieving expected goals.