District Priorities for Institutionalization Project Narrative |
| Table of ContentsNeed |
The need to produce more and better learning with our educational investment for the wide range of students who need our services is probably the most vexing challenge facing California's community colleges. The need is especially acute in terms of the under-prepared students who are entering our colleges in greater numbers and for whom community college may be the only available conduit to better jobs and a brighter future. The best research evidence indicates that increased investment in ongoing educational processes has no demonstrable impact on talent development or learning effectiveness (Pascarella and Terenzini, 1991; Astin, 1993). The level of retention and program completion at most California community colleges indicates that existing programs are not producing successful outcomes for many of our students for whom post-secondary education is most crucial to their chances for success later in life. As these students increase as a proportion of all students and the total number increases rapidly, we are challenged to develop programs that do a better job of helping students to succeed (Breneman, 1995; Barr and Tagg, 1995; Boggs, 1995; The California Higher Education Policy Center, 1996). But we cannot reliably produce more or better student learning until we can measure and assess the student learning we produce. Serious innovation to promote student success requires as a minimum two things: (1) that colleges systematically assess student learning and (2) that colleges use information thus gained about student learning to improve and adapt the curriculum to increase student success.
Palomar College has recognized the need to assess learning and to develop its programs in light of what we learn. Palomar's Mission Statement, adopted in 1991, expresses the goal this way: "We evaluate the relevant skills and knowledge of all of our students so as to guide them toward meaningful and productive educational experiences, patterned to develop their abilities as effectively as their preparation allows. We will evaluate our own performance in terms of our contribution to student learning and success." Our Vision Statement, adopted in the same year, projects a future in which "Palomar College judges its work and its programs and formulates its policies primarily on the basis of learning outcomes and has a comprehensive program for assessing those outcomes and responding to its findings."
Colleges will not change, however, no matter how pressing the need, unless the college community generates and embraces its own vision of change. Lasting change for the better will always be from within. With this principle in mind, in the spring of 1997 Palomar's Educational Master Planning Committee granted a small group of faculty released time to survey the entire faculty on their views on assessment and student success. In the fall of 1997, the Assessment of Learning Project (ALP) evaluated faculty attitudes on a variety of questions through written surveys and personal interviews. Their report, published in the spring of 1998, reveals that 74 percent of the faculty surveyed strongly agreed or agreed with the statement that Palomar College should develop a means to assess the knowledge and skills of all AA candidates and students transferring to four-year institutions. Faculty also expressed widespread agreement that certain core skills were essential for student success. Most of the faculty members randomly selected for personal interviews believed that the most basic core skills should be assessed or tracked by the college on an ongoing basis. Yet 53 percent of the faculty report that they did not have enough resources to adequately assess their students.
The Board of Governors states the statewide need to "deliver high quality education in a manner that achieves student success" and to"adapt to the changing educational needs of Californians so as to be relevant and timely" (RFA). Colleges can understand these needs and adapt to them in a relevant and timely manner only if they take greater responsibility for assessing essential skills and use the knowledge thus gained to adapt their programs to better promote student success. At Palomar College, we have recognized the need and made an institutional commitment to do so. We have instituted a process by which our own faculty have begun to develop standards and processes for college-wide implementation credible learning outcomes measures . It is to broaden participation and hasten our implementation of this work that we seek funding under this grant.
For the sake of coherence, the objectives of the proposal are organized functionallyBin the same categories used below in the Workplan. We have indicated in parentheses after the discussion of each objective the number(s) of the five objectives from the RFA that the more specific functional objective addresses. For example, if the functional objective addresses the Objective 3 from the RFA, it would be followed by (RFA 3).
Most of Palomar's faculty agree on a body of skills that most or all of our students should master before graduating. And of those faculty who responded to the assessment survey, 74 percent agreed or strongly agreed with the statement that Palomar should develop a means to assess the knowledge and skills of all AA candidates and transfer students. Common definitions of these skills will allow us to proceed to develop tools by which our faculty can gather more reliable and usable information about the abilities and potentials of our students than we can today. Our goal is to define those skills that students require for success in nearly all programs, across the curriculum, and to develop common standards for institutional assessment that all divisions and departments of the college can use and accept. (The working list of core skills that the ALP team has proposed will be used as a starting place in developing these definitions. It may be found in Appendix A.)
Included in those standards will be measurable benchmarks of student progress. These learning benchmarks will become a framework that can be incorporated into the curriculum development process. Learning benchmarks for core skills will be stated in terms broad enough to be applied in different subjects but narrow enough to identify levels of student development across the curriculum. For example, a benchmark in analysis and synthesis might be "the student identifies arguments in discursive writing, distinguishing supporting evidence from premises and premises from conclusions." A higher level benchmark might be "The student generates a written argument, distinguishing supporting evidence from premises and premises from conclusions." Such learning benchmarks could be assessed in music or chemistry or welding. While different kinds of data will be evidence in each of these subjects, the relationship between premise and conclusion will remain the same, and the ability of students to transfer the ability to analyze arguments from one discipline to another will be essential to success as a student. The definition of these common skills is an important task because it will allow us to assess then prioritize the skill deficiencies that the current curriculum is not adequately addressing. This process will especially benefit under-prepared students whose skill deficits are not being adequately addressed by the curriculum today. We have set the goal of adopting a common set of definitions for core skills and standards for their assessment by the third year of the grant, 2001-2. (RFA 1, 2, 3)
The definitions of core skills that we propose to develop can be tested by applying the standards for effective assessment that have been generated under Objective 1. Palomar has set the goal of establishing college-wide assessment of core skills by the target date of our Vision Statement, 2005. Our objective for the three-year period of this grant is to develop and pilot assessments of core skills in each of the four general categories of communication, cognition, interpersonal behavior, and intrapersonal behavior. That is a minimum; we hope and expect to initiate pilot assessments in most or all of the skills. We will test pilot assessments to find whether they are successful in placing students in terms of the learning benchmarks, and whether those benchmarks can be applied effectively in the pilot programs.(RFA 1, 3, 4, 5)
While many core skills can be reasonably assessed at the college level, many of our courses and programs need to assess skills in a distinctive context of a particular discipline or task. Our faculty devote much time and energy to trying to access student learning fairly and accurately. However, most faculty expressed frustration in our survey that they do not always have either the tools or the standards to do the job as effectively as they might. The best standards to guide us in developing more creative and effective assessment will be developed by and for our faculty. But these standards must be consistent with and reinforce the development of the core skills taught across the curriculum. Success in the disciplines should eventually be defined by learning benchmarks that are consistent with the core skill learning benchmarks. We propose to develop discipline-specific assessments integrated with core assessments in at least three departments. (RFA 1, 2, 4, 5)
Assessment of student learning is not an end in itself. Assessment and student success programs will not succeed in the long run unless they transform the institution. In the other objectives, we speak of what "the college" will do. In each case, this work will be done by collaborative faculty/staff teams under the central coordination of the ALP team and the Instructional Planning Committee. The products of their work will be forwarded in the form adopted by the Instructional Planning Committee to the Educational Master Planning Committee and, when adopted, incorporated into the college Educational Master Plan. The strategic goals of the Educational Master Plan, in turn, provide the common objectives that all departments and divisions of the college and all planning and governance committees will pursue.
Palomar is moving to follow the recommendations emerging from our last accreditation to develop a strategic planning model that will determine priorities for resource allocation and to implement program review (Evaluation Report). However, for either planning or program review to add real value they must be based on student success criteria and generate change that will increase student success. Palomar's Student Equity Plan specifically addresses barriers to student success, in developmental courses, the general curriculum, and student support services. What the Student Equity Plan lacks is a means to find out what works and what doesn't in the existing curriculum and respond with changes in the curriculum, pedagogy, and student support services that will increase student success. We incorporate as goals of this grant project several of the goals of the Student Equity Plan, thereby channeling planning for student success explicitly into the Educational Master Plan. (RFA 1, 2, 3, 4)
The outcome of our research, assessment, and planning should be a student success curriculum accompanied by effective pedagogy and support servicesBa curriculum adapted to the learning needs of our students, one that creates routes to success that begin where our students are now and leads to growing competence and eventual mastery of the skills they need to thrive in life and work. Both our survey and the interviews with faculty tell us that teachers at Palomar already use assessment of student learning in order to develop and modify their courses and their teaching. But many faculty expressed frustration that they have little information and less control over the students who enter their classes or the experiences that follow and build on their class work. The vast majority of faculty members interviewed proposed ideas for gathering better information to be used in guidance and placement so that students would be fully prepared for the courses they attempt and will attempt courses that help them to succeed. If we can design into our curriculum paths that our students can more realistically travel, we can raise the level of real student success without compromising excellence. To that end, we seek to institutionalize a process by which the evidence we gather through assessment about the success of students in programs and courses feeds back to the process by which departments and college committees develop and modify programs. Our course outlines of record already provide a framework for recording learning outcomes intended by a course or program. But in the past we have not had common definitions of those learning outcomes that could be used to evaluate their contribution to student success and remedy their deficiencies. With the development of standards and learning benchmarks for assessment of student learning, we will be able to provide feedback to departments on the success of their programs, stated in terms of the success of our students. Thus, assessment of our students will become formative assessment of our programs. Building a student success curriculum also requires that we use learning assessment to test alternative approaches in pedagogy and student support services to find which alternatives contribute most to student success. We cannot do that now because we have no common benchmarks of learning by which to compare alternative programs. Once we have established those benchmarks, we propose to conduct the first of what we hope will be an ongoing series of comparative studies. For example, we could compare the achievement of students in a team-taught learning community with students in comparable conventional courses in terms of their progress toward common learning benchmarks. We could compare the preforman (RFA 1, 3, 4, 5)
6. Involve faculty and staff in ongoing discussions and decision-making with respect to student success and inform them about best practices and current research.
Palomar's faculty and administrators have been leaders in developing the theory of the Learning Paradigm college (Barr, 1994; Barr and Tagg, 1995; Boggs, 1995-96). To put this theory into practice and genuinely transform the college requires that the organizational culture evolve to embrace student success as a governing principle in decision-making. This requires that faculty and staff not only be kept informed on a continuing basis of advances in assessment and pedagogy, but that they take an active role in developing the local response to assessment data and research. Thus, most of the activities of this project will be carried out by collaborative teams of faculty and other staff. The minimum goal is to have at least 12 faculty serving on interdisciplinary assessment teams by the second year of the grant and at least 20 by the third year. Faculty serving on project teams, under the direction of the ALP team and the Instructional Planning Committee, will conduct ongoing professional development activities, including but not limited to annual surveys of faculty attitudes and satisfaction with the developing student success programs, a minimum of three workshops each year on issues in assessment emerging from faculty responses, maintenance of an Internet site on student success strategies and assessment, and periodic presentations or publications concerning the work of the project, including presentations at the annual Conference on the Learning Paradigm, sponsored by Palomar College, and the annual Chancellor's Office Conference. (RFA 2, 4, 5)
Procedures Overview. The specific activities involved in the project are listed in the Application Annual Workplan. The following paragraphs describe the overall procedures to be followed.
Palomar seeks to develop a model that can be used by other colleges by which to institutionalize a student success curriculum and establish curriculum development processes that can adapt to changing student needs. In deciding how to proceed, we have considered the barriers that keep us from adapting the curriculum as it exists to student success needs. Among those barriers are a lack of information about how students are experiencing and responding to the existing curriculum and the absence of institutional structures that facilitate curriculum development across disciplines. Very often, proposals for change trigger institutional "defensive routines"
developed to maintain existing practices (Argyris, 1994).
Examples of liberal arts colleges that have been successful at using assessment of student learning to develop and modify the curriculum suggest that there are two key processes in overcoming these barriers (Farmer, 1988; Alverno College Faculty, 1994; Schulte and Loacker, 1994). First, the college community must have reliable, understandable information about student learning. This information must be meaningful to all and expressed in terms that the faculty has agreed to be significant. Second, there must be interdisciplinary groups among the faculty that communicate regularly and participate in decision making about assessment and curriculum.
The project will seek to develop shared definitions and standards for assessment of student learning. And it will attempt to do so through collaborative teams, led by faculty and consisting of faculty, administrators, and other staff. Four kinds of collaborative teams will do the bulk of the work:
The Assessment of Learning Project (ALP) Team will consist of four faculty members with substantial released time to coordinate the work of the project. The team leader will have 100 percent released time and the three other members 50 percent each.
The Core Project Team will consist of an interdisciplinary group of faculty and other staff, they will develop definitions, standards, benchmarks, and assessment protocols for core skills. Leader of core project team will receive 25 percent released time and team members will receive stipends.
Departmental Project Teams will consist of groups of faculty, and perhaps other staff, from a given department or academically similar departments; they will develop discipline-specific definitions, standards, benchmarks, and assessment protocols. Each Departmental Project Team will have a least one member who is also a member of a Curriculum Revision Team to provide an interdisciplinary perspective. Departmental Project Team members will receive stipends.
Curriculum Revision Team(s) will consist of faculty from different departments; they will develop protocols and work in their departments to develop protocols for integrating student success data into the curriculum development process and will participate in their own departments in the development of pilot course outlines to model the process for other departments. Curriculum Revision Team members will receive stipends.
The work products of all of the collaborative teams will be channeled to the Instructional Planning Committee, which will in turn make recommendations to the Educational Master Planning Committee and the Curriculum Committee.
In pursuing curriculum development, we will use as our chief guides and models the curriculum development processes pioneered at Alverno College (Alverno College Faculty, 1994). We will also consult the processes developed by Kings College (Farmer, 1988) and the Centre for Curriculum, Transfer, and Technology in British Columbia.
Feasibility of Solutions/Strategies. The best evidence of the feasibility of the overall project is the fact that it is an expansion of a locally initiated project begun at Palomar College as a way of pursuing the existing goals of its strategic planning process. As discussed above, we have designed the approach to the problem with an eye to the barriers that have prevented us from making more progress in the past. The following characteristics of the project also bear on its feasibility.
The project is research-based and research-driven. The basic design of the project is based on research in student learning and curricular reform and research-based models of assessment and curriculum development (Pascarella and Terenzini, 1991; Astin, 1993; Alverno College Faculty, 1994; Banta, et al., 1996; Banta, et al., 1996; Gaither, 1996). The initial activitiesBdefining core skills, developing and testing assessment standardsBall involve the collaborative formation of research hypotheses and the empirical testing of these hypotheses with real students and teachers. We believe that to develop a real student success curriculum requires that the college nurture a "culture of evidence," in which the answers to questions about student learning are not taken for granted but become objects of ongoing research. If the questions to be answered by research are generated by the faculty, staff, and students of the college, then the answers will be taken seriously.
The project is collaborative and faculty-driven. The best evidence indicates that programs to assess student learning and promote student success that are imposed upon colleges from outside do little to promote the long-term interests of students (Erwin, 1991; Weingartner, 1992; Ewell, 1993; Banta, et al., 1996). A program that can institutionalize a student success curriculum must emerge from the college community. And it must emerge through collaboration among faculty, student services staff, and other college personnel, not just as the individual activities of a few dedicated teachers. This proposal integrates collaboration, driven by interdisciplinary faculty groups, into every stage of the project. We have already laid the foundation for this collaborative work by making an initial survey of faculty views on assessing student learning. We propose to refine the recommendations emerging from this survey in interdisciplinary focus groups of faculty and other staff and to keep faculty appraised on an ongoing basis of the developing project.
The project provides rewards and incentives for faculty participation. One of the reasons why we have not made more rapid progress in developing the ideas for change that have been discussed for years on our campus is that our faculty are too occupied with teaching to put in the hours necessary to develop a student success curriculum. Especially in the initial stages, the investment of time required to formulate and organize change is daunting. We have made a beginning by funding some limited released time for four faculty members to do the initial faculty survey. We propose with this grant to provide released time for several faculty members to do the major work of organizing and developing the project. We further propose to offer stipends to a larger number of faculty members for participating in collaborative teams. Released time frees up faculty to spend time on the project. Perhaps equally important, even the modest stipends proposed here provide recognition and tangible reward to faculty investing time and effort in change.
Short-term and Long-term Benefits to Target Populations. The chief target population for the project is students, and especially those students who face significant barriers to success. A secondary target population is the college faculty and staff. We believe that in order to best serve our students we must develop processes of change that will allow the people who work at the college to understand better and adapt more effectively to student needs.
In the short term, the period of the grant, major benefits should be seen in the secondary target population: in the institutional processes and the institutional culture of the college. We should see involvement by the faculty in interdisciplinary discussions of core skills and standards for assessing learning in those skills. By the end of the three-year grant period we hope to see a college-wide consensus on a clearly defined body of skills that should be assessed in all courses and programs and agreement on model standards for assessing those skills. We hope to see model assessment programs developed in at least three departments, coordinated to the assessment of core skills. We believe that the development of a common language and standards for speaking about learning across the curriculum will have substantial benefits. It will allow faculty across disciplines and fields to act in concert, based on real evidence of student performance, to address the needs of our students.
In the past, pedagogy and learning have often been considered the province of the individual instructor in the classroom, or of the department. The result is that the student's experience has often been balkanized among competing departments that do not speak the same pedagogical language. The days when faculty members in one department can know little and care less about the student's experience in the rest of the curriculum are gone. Students will benefit directly if they find that their instructors and advisors are "on the same page" in terms of what students need to learn, in what sequence, and how. To achieve this, we must bring pedagogy into the arena of genuinely shared governance and planning, which in the past have often been relegated to bureaucratic and business functions. This will be a real change in the institutional culture, and can not take place overnight. But it must happen is we are to truly institutionalize student success prioritiesBthe major purpose of this grant.
In the middle to long term the benefits to students of assessment-guided curriculum, pedagogy, and student support services will be enormous. Even in the sort term, pilot assessment projects will allow counselors and other faculty to direct students much more meaningfully toward programs that will address their immediate needs. Even the definition of common skills will produce a more coherent emphasis on clear learning outcomes in many courses. And as we gather evidence on the effectiveness of various approaches and programs with different groups of students it will be possible to design learning environments that much more directly address the needs of students. In the past, when large numbers of students fail in a given course or general education program, the only option has been to send the students back to repeat essentially the same experience, perhaps with a different instructor. But if many students are failing in a program, the program is not well adapted to the students. With an institutionalized, consistent, interdisciplinary assessment system, evidence of widespread student failure to achieve clearly defined learning outcomes can guide us as to how to modify existing programs or develop new ones to address the deficiencies that keep students from succeeding.
The greatest benefits of this program to students will not, of course, be achieved during the period of the grant. It would be impossible to truly institutionalize global changes that would have great long-term benefits in just three years. However, one of the activities of the last year of the grant will be to set specific goals for improvement in measurable student success outcomes, including extensions of the goals of our Student Equity Plan, increases in retention, course completion, and achievement of designated standards of performance in the core skills. We believe that simply setting these goals will benefit our students because it will focus the institution unambiguously on measurable student success activities. But we believe that in three years we will have the institutionalized apparatus in place to actually achieve such goals.
Performance Outcomes/Evaluation Design
Institutionalization. The major focus of this grant is the institutionalization of student success priorities. In this proposal, all of the performance outcomes defined for all of the objectives are linked to the shared governance planning processes by which Palomar College sets goals and shapes policy for the future. So important is this integration of student success into the very fabric of college decision making that we have identified it as an explicit objective of the project: Objective 4. We cannot prescribe in advance the specific goals that the shared governance process will set for the college, but we can and do mandate as part of the project the establishment of common standards, assessment of student learning in light of those standards, and the use of information about student learning in the curriculum development and goal setting process.
Indicators of Student Success. A major focus of the project, especially for the first two years, will be the development of significant and credible indicators of student successBnot indirect indicators that can be used only for summative evaluation of programs, but direct, real-time indicators in the form of benchmarks that show whether students are learning what they need to in order to succeed. It deserves emphasis that no program can truly institutionalize movement toward student success without institutionalizing assessment using such benchmarks of student learning. We have many excellent models, including our own Student Equity Plan, of plans to promote access to learning opportunities. But it is now clear that access is not enough. Access does not mean success. We need to do more than bring disadvantaged and under-prepared students in the front door. We need to make sure that they develop their talents and abilities and leave with authentic certification of real accomplishment. Success in community college means learning: mastering the skills and knowledge that empower students to take their place as citizens of their state and nation, scholars pursuing higher education, and workers in today's economy. Our offer of access rings hollow if we cannot guide students along the paths that will lead them to their goals. And we can only provide that guidance if we have some clear and constant measure of our success at promoting the success of our students. We cannot institutionalize student success without measuring student success.
Benefits to the College, Region, and State. We believe that the college exists to serve its students and create pathways to success for those students. The greatest benefit that can accrue to the college is to fulfill its mission. We believe, and this conclusion was powerfully reinforced by the recent interviews of faculty across the curriculum, that the vast majority of our faculty are community college teachers because they have embraced this institutional mission as a personal mission. They teach because they want to help students succeed. So in discussing the benefits of this program to students we have already explained its major benefit to the college.
We also believe, however, that the project will benefit the college by advancing understanding among faculty and promoting teamwork and collaboration within the campus community. By creating collaborative teams and engaging in an extensive outreach program to all faculty and staff, we will advance the work of building a collaborative culture at Palomar and improve the quality of communication and shared governance.
The goal of this project is not only to establish a student success curriculum at Palomar College, but to model a process by which other colleges can do the same. We do not presume to suggest what assessment methods and learning benchmarks are appropriate for other colleges. But we do believe that the processes through which one college can develop those methods and processes can be modeled and emulated. We propose to make our progress in this project public, both on the Internet and through presentations at conferences. Others will learn from our examples, from our failures as well as our successes. Developing a student success curriculum, pedagogy, and support system is the most urgent challenge facing all of California's community colleges. To the extent that we can model a process for institutionalizing change to promote student success, our students, their present and future employers, the economy to which they contribute, and the state in which they are voters and citizens will benefit greatly.
Project Evaluation Design. An Evaluation Team will be established, consisting of at least one member of the Instructional Planning Committee, at least one member of the Educational Master Planning Committee, a representative from the Office of Institutional Research and Planning and selected faculty and staff members with experience in program evaluation. This team will evaluate the work products of the project in light of the scheduled performance outcomes and assess the progress thus far. The Evaluation Team, along with the ALP Team, will consult with the third party evaluator and present a written evaluation report to the Project Monitor at the close of each academic year. Since the results of the project will guide the development of the Educational Master Plan (Activity 4.1), the Educational Master Planning Committee will need to base project plans on the lessons learned so far. In addition, the annual survey of faculty perceptions of the project (Activity 6.1) will provide an evaluation of progress from the point of view of the faculty.
In addition to this ongoing internal evaluation, Dr. Tim Riordan of Alverno College in Milwaukee, Wisconsin will visit the campus once each year of the grant to evaluate progress toward the objectives and advise the project leaders based on that evaluation. We will submit a written evaluation of progress each year to the Project Monitor which will include Dr. Riordan's report.
The selection of a third party evaluator from Alverno College is a purposeful attempts to hold the project to the highest standards. Alverno College has been in the vanguard of credible, systematic learning assessment for many years and is almost universally recognized as an exemplary model of assessment-as-learning. In 1996, the Pew Charitable Foundation established the Pew Leadership Award for the Renewal of Undergraduate Education to recognize colleges "that have undertaken bold steps to strengthen undergraduate education, better align faculty work and organizational structure with the mission of the institution, and control costs." After an extensive nationwide search, the foundation chose Alverno as one of the first three recipients of the award. Alverno has conducted a consortium project sponsored by the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE) seeking to apply assessment-based principles of curricular design at a variety of colleges, including community colleges. It has recently been recognized by the Kellog and MacArthur Foundations for its pioneering work in assessment. Dr. Riordan has published widely in assessment and institutional change and has worked extensively as a consultant to other colleges developing assessment-based programs. His vita is included as Appendix B.
Methodology. Each objective in the Application Annual Workplan is broken down into specific activities, each with a specific product or outcome. In each case, the nature of the report of the outcome and the recipient of the report is specified. The project timeline will be posted on the project Web site (Activity 6.4) so that information on ongoing progress will be publicly available.
Measurement of results of pilot tests will be conducted with the advice and consultation of the Office of Institutional Research and Planning.
Alverno College Faculty. Student Assessment-as-Learning at Alverno College. Milwaukee: Alverno College, 1994.
Argyris, Chris. "Reasoning, Action Strategies, and Defensive Routines: The Case of OD Practitioners." On Organizational Learning. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1994.
Astin, Alexander W. What Matters in College: Four Critical Years Revisited. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1993.
Banta, Trudy W., Jon P. Lund, Karen E. Black, and Frances W. Oblander. Assessment in Practice: Putting Principles to Work on College Campuses. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996.
Barr, Robert B. "A New Paradigm for Community Colleges." The News. Research and Planning Group for the California Community Colleges, February 1994.
Barr, Robert B., and John Tagg. "From Teaching to Learning: New Paradigm for Undergraduate Education." Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning. November-December 1995: 13-25.
Boggs, George R. "The Learning Paradigm." Community College Journal, Dec/Jan 1995-96: 24-27.
Breneman, David W. A State of Emergency? Higher Education in California. The California Higher Education Policy Project, January 1995.
The California Higher Education Policy Center. Shared Responsibility: Strategies to Enhance Quality and Opportunity in California Higher Education. The California Higher Education Policy Center: June 1996.
Erwin, T. Dary. Assessing Student Learning and Development. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1991.
Ewell, Peter T. "The Role of States and Accreditors in Shaping Assessment Practice." In Trudy W. Banta and Associates (ed.) Making a Difference: Outcomes of a Decade of Assessment in Higher Education. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1993: 339-56.
Evaluation Report: Palomar Community College District. WASC Evaluation Team,1996.
Farmer, D. W. Enhancing Student Learning: Emphasizing Essential Competencies in Academic Programs. Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania: King's College, 1988.
Gaither, Gerald H. (ed.). Assessing Performance in an Age of Accountability: Case Studies. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995.
Pascarella, Ernest T., and Patrick T. Terenzini. How College Affects Students: Findings and Insights from Twenty Years of Research. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1991.
Schulte, Judeen, and Georgine Loacker. Assessing General Education Outcomes for the Individual Student: Performance Assessment-as-Learning. Part I Designing and Implementing Performance Assessment Instruments. Milwaukee: Alverno College, 1994
Weingartner, Rudolph H. Undergraduate Education: Goals and Means. Phoenix, American Council on Education/Oryx Press, 1992.
What Work Requires of Schools -A SCANS Report for America 2000. Washington, D.C.: U.S.
Dept. of Labor, Secretary's Commission On Achieving Necessary Skills, 1991.
Top of Page | ALP Home | Palomar College