Assessment of Learning at Palomar

A Report and Proposal

The Assessment of Learning Project Team

Report

Introduction

Summary of Work Thus Far

Departmental Project Team

The Digital Portfolio

Proposal

The Next Step: Value-added Learning Assessment

Funding

Introduction

The Assessment of Learning Project (ALP) at Palomar College is completing its fourth year of operation, the third under a Fund for Student Success Grant from the Chancellor's Office of the California Community Colleges. The purpose of the project from its inception has been to realize the goal set forth in the Palomar College Vision Statement: "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." The larger purpose for a comprehensive assessment program is to provide feedback to the College, to the community, to our students, and to the State. That feedback will allow us to develop our curriculum to better serve our students and better prepare and advise our students to achieve the best learning they can as they progress through the curriculum.

The work of ALP so far has laid the foundation for an on-going, comprehensive assessment program of the sort envisioned in our Vision Statement. However, this is only the foundation. We have defined the Core Skills that should be the initial focus of outcomes assessment. We have conducted pilot tests of interdisciplinary assessment in a number of classes. We have designed and are now testing a framework for an inexpensive, adaptable tool that can provide the framework for ongoing development: the Digital Portfolio with its embedded Skills Transcript. We believe that the Digital Portfolio can become a uniquely valuable tool for providing feedback to students, faculty, the institution, and others about significant learning outcomes of our work. But it is only a tool. To produce positive results, we must use that tool consistently over the long term and learn to use it better with experience. If we make a long-term commitment to using this tool in order to learn what our students are learning and respond to the ongoing feedback, then it will transform the college experience for Palomar's students in a positive way. We must now move toward an ongoing strategic commitment to support and expand the use of the Digital Portfolio by engaging an increasing number of our faculty in the conversation about assessment as a tool to promote student learning. In the context of this ongoing commitment we can discuss and experiment with ways to institutionalize our skills assessment to assure that all of our graduates are prepared with the skills they need for success in the 21st Century.

Our work thus far proves the practicality and the utility of institutional assessment as an ongoing activity of the College. We can and should seek outside funding sources to support and hasten our progress. But we will receive outside support only if the College is committed to realizing its own goals and demonstrates that commitment by institutionalizing assessment processes and funding them on an ongoing basis.

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Summary of Work Thus Far

The Assessment of Learning Project (ALP) team (Gene Jackson [responsible administrator], Michael Arguello, Jose Esteban, Lee Kerckhove, Teresa Laughlin, Barbara Schnelker, John Tagg, Fari Towfiq, and Cynthia Watson [deceased]) has completed two-and-a-half years of its three-year project. Below is a summary of completed goals.

I. Faculty Survey: The ALP team conducted a survey of the faculty in fall 1997 to determine current assessment practices and future goals. Twenty-nine faculty members (chosen at random) were interviewed as a follow-up to the initial survey. Seventy-four percent of the respondents strongly agreed or agreed with the statement that Palomar College should develop a means to assess knowledge and skills of all AA candidates and our students transferring to four-year institutions. The report is available on the ALP Web site.

II. Core Skills: ALP has made significant progress in defining and setting Benchmarks for core skills that are shared, taught, and assessed by all disciplines at Palomar College and determining a protocol to measure those skills. The Core Project Team (along with the other ALP team members) enlisted the participation of faculty, staff, and administrators in a series of focus groups.

A. Fall 1998 Focus Groups: The fall 1998 focus groups were very successful and provided the team with important and valuable information that will be utilized in the design and implementation of the assessment of learning.

B. Spring 1999 Focus Groups: The spring 1999 focus groups included the faculty and staff at Palomar College as well as members of the community, colleagues from local universities and high schools, and students from Palomar College.

C. Core Skills evolution: Using the feedback from the fall and spring 1998-99 focus groups, the ALP team and involved faculty and staff developed a working draft of the Core Skills that a student who graduates with an AA degree, or transfers to an university should master. This list of Core Skills was presented to the Instructional Planning Committee (IPC) in the spring of 1999. The IPC adopted it with minor revisions in the spring of 1999, and the Educational Master Planning Committee (EMPC) adopted the list in the fall of 1999. The IPC was designated to review the list of Core Skills each year for possible revision and improvement. However, in the fall of 2000 the Instructional Planning Committee was eliminated. ALP has requested guidance from the Vice President for Instruction, but the planning and governance structure of the College are currently in a state of flux and it is impossible to predict what the new and appropriate review processes will be.

D. Benchmarks development. During the 1999-2000 academic year, the ALP team developed an initial set of Benchmarks, specific standards that would indicate development of the Core Skills at three developmental levels: beginning, developing, and advanced. During the fall of 2000, ALP posted the draft Benchmarks on its Web page, invited suggestions for revision, and held focus groups on the draft Benchmarks. The Benchmarks were substantially revised prior to the spring semester 2001 and are now in the process of further revision and review. They will be used in the pilot of the Digital Portfolio in the spring 2001.

III. Statement of Principles: In the first set of focus groups in the fall of 1998 several participants raised a number of questions and concerns. In response the ALP team developed a draft of the Statement of Principles. This document articulates the purpose of the Assessment of Learning Project, and establishes ground rules for how we will conduct institutional assessment at Palomar. The Statement of Principles was adopted by the Institutional Planning Committee (IPC) and the Educational Master Planning Committee (EMPC) in Spring of 2000. It is posted on the ALP Web site.

IV. Curriculum Revision: The Core Skills have been approved by the Curriculum Committee and Faculty Senate and will be distributed by Curriculum Subcommittee C to all departments in the fall of 2001 with a request for the departments to identify the Core Skills that are taught in their classes, make a report back to the Curriculum Committee with this information, and begin to build the assessment of these Core Skills into the Course Outlines of Record as they are revised in our usual rotation, with all Course Outlines to be revised within three years.

V. Project Web Site: There is an ALP Web site that is updated regularly. The ALP reports and relevant information are posted at

VI. Integration of Core Skills in the Planning Process: The Instructional Planning Committee (IPC) adopted the Core Skills in the spring of 1999. The Educational Master Planning Committee (EMPC) adopted the Core Skills in the fall of 1999.

VII. Survey of Best Practices: The ALP team is surveying best practices in assessment at other institutions continuously. A bibliography and links to other assessment sites are posted on the project Website.

VIII. Integration of Core Skills in the Planning Process: The Instructional Planning Committee (IPC) adopted the Core Skills in the spring of 1999. The Educational Master Planning Committee (EMPC) adopted the Core Skills in the fall of 1999.

IX. Survey of Best Practices: The ALP team is surveying best practices in assessment at other institutions continuously. A bibliography and links to other assessment sites are posted on the project Website.

X. Professional Development and Workshop Presentations: The ALP team presented its work and its findings at many conferences and professional development activities:

A.     Great Ideas For Teachers (G.I.F.T.S.) at fall orientation, August 1998

B.     The Community College League of California, Long Beach, California, November 1998

C.     The Third North American Conference on the Learning Paradigm, San Diego, California, January 1999

D. Palomar College Governing Board Meeting, February 19 99

E. Palomar College Department Chairs Meeting, March 1999

F. Point Loma Nazarene University, June 1999

G. Palomar College Faculty Orientation, August 1999

H. California Assessment Institute, October 1999

I. Visitations to department meetings, fall 1999 and spring 2000

J. Professional Development Workshop on Assessment, November 1999

K. Adjunct Faculty Orientation, January 2000

L. Professional Development Workshop, March 2000

M. The Fourth North American Conference on the Learning Paradigm, March 2000

N. RP Group Conference, April 2000

O. The California Assessment Institute, October 2000

P. The Community College League of California, November 2000

Q. The League for Innovation for the Community College Innovations 2001 Conference, February 2001

R. The Fifth North American Conference on the Learning Paradigm, March 2001

XI. Departmental Project

The Departmental Project Team conducted pilots of assessment based on the Core Skills in several classes. In fall of 1999 the Departmental Team determined standards for evaluation of the Core Skills. In spring 2000 they conducted pilot assessments in three departments: Math, English as a Second Language, and Performing Arts. Their report is available on the ALP Web page. During the fall semester of 2000 the Departmental Project Team continued its pilot and will produce a revised report during the spring semester 2001. A more detailed report of the work of the Departmental Project Team follows.

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The Departmental Project Team

The purpose of the Departmental Project Team is to work in conjunction with the Assessment of Learning Project to apply Palomar College�s list of Core Skills to the content and activities of courses in three selective disciplines. The five members of the Departmental Project Team represent three disciplines at Palomar College. Fari Towfiq and Cynthia Watson have been the Team�s coordinators and have also served on the ALP team. Robert Jones represents the discipline of mathematics. Michael Mufson represents the discipline of the performing arts. Lee Chen represents the discipline of English as a Second Language. Recently, Lee Kerckhove has joined the team as a co-coordinator of the departmental project team, and Matthews Chakkanakuzhi and Cynthia Anfinson have joined the mathematics portion of the project. A brief overview of this project follows.

MATHEMATICS

Robert Jones, Assistant Professor, is following his new assessment-inclusive syllabus in his Pre-Algebra class. Fari Towfiq, Associate Professor, is implementing the pilot assessments in her Intermediate Algebra classes. Towfiq and Jones worked together to formulate the Benchmarks for mathematics and are using the same assessment methods and feedback forms in their respective classes. They have been very careful to make their assessments convenient enough to fit into mathematics courses that must cover a prescribed number of chapters in a standardized text in 16 weeks. Fari Towfiq and Robert Jones have selected two Core Skill areas to assess in their respective algebra classes. In the first area of Cognition, they provide for the assessment of students' use of the two Core Skills of Problem-Solving, and Transfer of Knowledge. The "Skills Assessment Cover Sheet" is a feedback form they developed to be filled out by the instructor and attached to students' homework or exam papers after a grade has been assigned. Towfiq and Jones do not intend for this Cover Sheet to determine any part of their students' grades. In their classes it is for on-going feedback only. They also developed four forms (Peer Assessment, Team Assessment, Self-Assessment, and Instructor Evaluation of Teamwork) that single out Teamwork in the Core Skill area of Social Interaction. Each provides for feedback/assessment from various perspectives on team participation and team presentations. Recently, Chakkanakuzhi and Anfinson contributed to the revision and modification of these forms.

PERFORMING ARTS

Michael Mufson, Associate Professor, Theater Arts, is applying the Benchmarks that he formulated to his Introduction to Theater class, which includes improvisation, workshop scripting, and performance of the students' own pieces. Michael Mufson chose the general Core Skills (ALP Website) categories of Social Interaction, Aesthetic Responsiveness, and Cognition as the basis for his Introduction to Theater Arts assessment pilot. His first two feedback forms--"Self Assessment" and "Peer Assessment" focus on the Social Interaction abilities of "Teamwork" and "Effective Citizenship." Students use them to assess their three collaborative projects. His third feedback form, "Visual Representation Assessment," applies to individual students' Visual Representation projects. It focuses on the Cognitive category of Analysis and Synthesis.

ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE

Lee Chen, Assistant Professor, has included his writing assessment Benchmarks in the syllabus of his on-line ESL Advanced Writing class. His Benchmarks are just as useful in the "real-space" classroom as they are in the virtual classroom. Lee Chen has designed an on-line ESL Advanced Writing course to be offered by Palomar College in the 2000-2001 academic year. He developed two forms. The first, "Instructor Feedback," applies to the sub-categories of Speaking and Listening. It provides information to the student from the instructor about the quality of his/her participation in the virtual class discussions. All students in the online class receive emailed feedback twice during the semester--in the third week and at the end. A second form, "Individual Assessment," appraises the student's writing, which is the fourth sub-category under the Core Skill of Communication. Students receive feedback via this Individual Assessment at the beginning and end of the semester, at about the same times they receive feedback on the quality of their online discussion.

Cynthia Watson, Associate Professor, was teaching a Literacy Level English as a Second Language class using videotape assessment as a source for feedback and evaluation in the two language modes of speaking and listening. She developed a video assessment for her Beginning ESL class, which focuses on the Communication Core Skills of Speaking and Listening (ALP Website). She developed assessment Benchmarks for student video presentations at four proficiency levels, and a form that she and her students use when they rate videotaped presentations. This form closely (but not exactly) follows a primary trait rating scale design. At the beginning of the semester, it is used for feedback only; at semester's end it is used both for feedback and to assign a grade. In Beginning ESL, Watson videotaped students twice--at the beginning and end of the semester. She then tracked these students' developing speaking proficiencies by videotaping them at the end of each semester as they moved upward through the levels of the ESL program.

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The Digital Portfolio

The idea of the Digital Portfolio has evolved as a tool to address the myriad problems that arise when we attempt to move from the abstract discussion of knowledge and skills to actually implementing assessment of student learning. Assessment is valuable only if it helps us to design the curriculum and pedagogy better, to achieve more and better student learning. Yet the very fragmentation of the curriculum that calls us to define student learning goals more clearly poses challenges when we come to assessing student learning achievement across the curriculum. The Digital Portfolio is an inexpensive, efficient, expandable tool that will allow us to incrementally integrate assessment into the curriculum and make the curriculum responsive to real evidence of learning outcomes.

The Digital Portfolio will document the student's path to academic accomplishment throughout the student's college career, and generate a living transcript that can be used by both the student and the institution as evidence of that accomplishment. The portfolio will also provide a framework for student goal-setting, for advising students to support accomplishing their goals, and for ongoing feedback to students on their strengths and weaknesses. The portfolio allows for instant interaction with the student. The Digital Portfolio, at a minimum, will consist of three key elements:

1. An Education Plan that will document the student's academic goals, including mastery of the Core Skills, and career goals and will outline the student's path to achieving those goals. The Education Plan will contain the components of education plans that counselors currently develop with students, but will expand on that model. It will include both the student's academic goals, including major, intended degree completion, and courses. But it will also include career goals and the placement materials. And it will be organized in light of the Core Skills, with the purpose of guiding the student to develop not just a list of courses leading to a degree but a plan to complete the Skills Transcript in the most effective way.

The Education Plan can become a major tool in advisement. Once a significant cohort of students are participating in the Digital Portfolio, summary data on skill success can provide information to students to help them to develop better Education Plans: what courses are most effective at assisting student to make progress in the Core Skills? What groupings of courses best reinforce skill development? What sequence of courses works best in supporting students as they develop the Core Skills? Today, students make many decisions about what courses to take and when to take them on the basis of anecdotal evidence or no evidence at all. By gathering information about students' actual experience of the curriculum, we can empower and assist students to design the curriculum that meets their learning needs and maximizes the benefits of their educational investment.

2. A Skills Transcript that will document the student's developmental level in the Core Skills. The Skills Transcript will not replace the conventional grade transcript, but it will provide both students and faculty vital information that the current transcript omits. It will let students know where they stand in their progress toward academic success in terms of clearly defined skills that they use in all of their classes. It will give them a report not just of a single faculty member in a single class, but a composite judgment of several faculty members using a common standard. The individual skills transcript will provide the student with valuable feedback on her progress toward academic success. At the same time, the data base of the skills performance of students overall will allow faculty members and the College to recognize gaps in the curriculum and strengths and weaknesses in existing programs and to base decisions about the design of the curriculum and learning environments on evidence of student learning outcomes.

3. A Learning Portfolio that will preserve examples of the student's work demonstrating achievement of the Core Skills. The heart of the Digital Portfolio will be an actual portfolio of student work. This portfolio can include any student performance that can be recorded digitally: text, photographs, paintings or drawings, audio and video recordings, and computer files of all kinds. The Learning Portfolio will serve three important functions.

(1) It will reinforce and exemplify the reports of student skills in the Skills Transcript. One of the dangers of any kind of quantitative report of student abilities is that it can become reductionistic, providing only a narrow and artificial version of the abilities. If assessment is to provide an authentic reflection of actual student abilities, it must be linked to actual student performances. The Learning Portfolio provides that link.

(2) It will provide direct, concrete evidence of student learning to transfer institutions, potential employers, and the public. The Learning Portfolio will allow students to demonstrate what they can do by showing that they have done it. Thus it will become a tool that students will use in applying to transfer institutions and career placement.

(3) It will promote interdisciplinary curriculum development and pedagogy. As students seek to develop their Learning Portfolios and faculty support them in that effort, both students and faculty will increasingly explore the connections among disciplines and courses based on the Core Skills.

The computer-based portfolio will provide a detailed template for use by students and faculty. The template will allow for rapid placement, viewing, and scoring of content. At the beginning of the student's college career, the student's portfolio will be a blank template. Under each Core Skill heading in the Skills Transcript will be a description of the skill and the Benchmarks to be achieved by the student over her college career. Under that description the student and the student's instructors will indicate when and how the student makes progress toward that particular skill.

Scores will be compiled into a larger data set that will serve to instruct and guide teaching and institutional goals. Once a substantial number of students have portfolios, they will make a valuable body of data available to the College about student trends and success at learning outcomes. The portfolio can serve from the very beginning as a tool to support student advisement and rationalize individual student academic planning.

The portfolio will reside on a server at Palomar College, but it can easily be duplicated on a CD-ROM so the student may present it to potential employers and transfer institutions as direct evidence skill mastery and academic accomplishment.

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The Next Step: Value-added Learning Assessment

The Palomar College Vanguard College Team has made the objective of Learning Outcomes its major focus. That objective reads: �Palomar College will agree on learning outcomes for a core program of the college�s choice, on strategies to improve learning outcomes, on assessment processes to measure the acquisition of learning outcomes, and on means for documenting achievement of outcomes.� The proposal that follows fulfills nearly every aspect of this central Vanguard College objective. This objective in turn echoes and reinforces the keystone of the Palomar College Vision: "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."

The work that ALP has accomplished has laid a foundation for assessment based on learning outcomes in significant Core Skills. In order to attain the Vanguard College objectives and the Palomar College Vision, the College must build upon the ALP foundation. In order for this to become reality the College must incorporate assessment into the budget and institutionalize learning assessment.

ALP has laid the foundation for a comprehensive assessment program by establishing common definitions and standards for the assessment of learning outcomes. To build on that foundation, the College should seek to develop a comprehensive program that will add value for students, faculty, staff, and the community. The comprehensive assessment program we build should perform the following four tasks:

Provide ongoing feedback to students across the curriculum about their progress toward significant learning outcomes, competencies in our core skills, as defined by the faculty.

Substantial research shows that one of the great barriers to student learning is that students do not retain what they have learned and apply it in different contexts. Not only do students "forget" material once learned, the skills and procedural knowledge they do master often remain highly context-dependent. One of the major practical elements of "critical thinking" is the ability to apply skills or knowledge in a new context. Even when students are exercising skills that have broad application in a variety of disciplines or applications, they often don't realize it.

Scholars who have studied the conventional college curriculum have found that its major characteristic, from the point of view of students, is its fragmentation. This is especially so in the General Education curriculum. The specific course requirements seem to make little difference to significant learning outcomes if students cannot find the common threads that link together their experiences in different courses.

We believe that assessment feedback can directly add significant value for students by illuminating and repeatedly reminding them of the interconnections among the separate courses and disciplines that make up their programs. The Core Skills describe the threads that run through the entire curriculum, and together with the Benchmarks provide a common language and set of objective standards that can be applied across the curriculum. If applied over the long term, assessment designed around the Core Skills can improve the quality of learning by rationalizing the curriculum for our students.

As soon as possible, we should attempt to provide information to counselors and students concerning the skill demands and goals of their courses. For example, we can provide a list of skills assessed and developmental levels to counselors who advise our first cohort groups. The schedule of classes can provide students information on the skills that individual courses focus on so that students can plan their schedules and programs to develop their skills transcript. Eventually, the College catalog descriptions of each class can include information on the skill requirements and goals of that class. The College can then evaluate how thoroughly it is offering instruction and assessment of its core skills and revise curriculum offerings as necessary

Provide ongoing feedback to the faculty and the College about student progress toward these learning outcomes.

The fragmentation of the curriculum affects not only students but also faculty. Most faculty members have opinions about what students should be learning in their other classes, but very few have any solid information on what students are actually studying and being assessed for in the educational program as a whole. The Digital Portfolio will provide faculty members significant information about the developmental level of specific students in specific skills and also provide them with a global picture of the developmental progress of large cohorts of students. It will provide comparative information to faculty members about how other faculty members have assessed a student's work and will provide easy access to examples of a student's work. As the data base grows, it will provide the faculty valid information on the strengths and deficiencies of their courses and programs to assist them in creating more effective learning environments.
Provide documentation of student learning to students, transfer institutions, employers, governing agencies, and the public.

The Digital Portfolio addresses the need for accountability to the public and funding agencies in a way that also reinforces sound pedagogy, academic freedom, and institutional autonomy. It will also provide better evidence of significant student learning than any standardized instrument imposed from above could do. Not only will the Digital Portfolio be a tool that our faculty can use to monitor and improve student learning outcomes, it will also be a tool that we can use to demonstrate to the world our success and ongoing improvement in generating student learning. The real standard of success in seeking public support for our ongoing programs is not any particular metric of "excellence"; because there are no common measures of significant learning outcomes, it is very hard to show that we are achieving learning to point X. What legislators, taxpayers, and regulators alike really want to see is improvement. And today, we can't demonstrate it. The Digital Portfolio will give us the means to show that we are addressing our weaknesses and building on our strengths on an ongoing basis. It will allow us, for the first time, to not just assert but document that we are a learning organization in the double sense that we make learning happen for our students and that we learn how to continuously improve in doing so as an institution. The Digital Portfolio could create a new, learning-friendly model of accountability that addresses the concerns of our various publics by meeting the needs of our students.

Establish and maintain a process for the faculty and the college to continuously review, revise, and improve the curriculum and pedagogy through open conversation across disciplines in response to feedback on learning outcomes.

The fragmentation of the current curriculum flows directly from the isolation of faculty members from one another in their disciplinary silos. The whole curriculum does not speak clearly to students about common and integrated learning goals because faculty members do not speak clearly and in a common language to one another about the goals of their pedagogy and the meaning of the curriculum. This fragmentation is largely a byproduct of the rapid growth of our institutions; as our colleges have grown larger, we have not been able to maintain the level of communication that was more easily achieved when colleges were smaller and everyone knew everyone else on a first-name basis. If we want to create an improved learning environment for our students, we much communicate more clearly about goals and means. Individual faculty members, even exceptionally talented ones who work very hard, can do only so much working in isolation from one another. Dramatic improvements in student learning for the majority of students cannot best be achieved by faculty members acting separately. The lever that can achieve transformative change is collaboration across the faculty.

The Core Skills provide a template for a continuing conversation across the curriculum in which the faculty can define common goals and adjust both curriculum and pedagogy in light of those goals. The Digital Portfolio provides a framework for faculty to gather ongoing information to guide them in refining goals and improving performance.

Once the conversation is underway, we believe that it will be neither burdensome nor time consuming to maintain it. The process of norming faculty assessments across the curriculum and incrementally modifying the Benchmarks for the Core Skills will be the ongoing task that faculty will need to perform, organized in teams around each skill. Data from the Digital Portfolio can be reviewed annually or each semester and issues can be discussed on an ongoing basis.

Initiating the conversation, however, will require a significant investment of time and effort from each faculty member. The College will need to support individual faculty members in gaining familiarity with the Core Skills and Benchmarks, adapting classroom assessments to the Digital Portfolio, and developing the processes for norming assessment of the Benchmarks and reviewing those Benchmarks and recording these assessments in the Skills Transcript. Therefore, we have proposed that faculty members be introduced to the process in small groups over a period of several years.

Each of these four tasks will add distinctive value to the institution and our learning programs. The full development of the Digital Portfolio has the potential to accomplish them.

In accomplishing these tasks, we must, of course be ever mindful of the requirements of academic freedom, scholarly standards of evidence, and the need to respect the autonomy of students, faculty, and staff. We believe that the Palomar College Statement of Principles on Assessment amply protects these principles and that it should guide us as we move forward. One implication of the Statement of Principles is that the institution should not mandate specific changes in pedagogy but should create an environment where faculty members can voluntarily participate in assessment and curriculum development. The Digital Portfolio can provide the framework for incrementally increasing faculty participation on a voluntary basis, while providing a growing data base that will answer many important questions about what and how students are learning.

We take the Vanguard College process seriously because we believe that the five goals of a learning college reflect our own Vision and challenge us to become a true learning college. The ongoing assessment work that we propose here will move us forward quickly on nearly all of the Vanguard College Objectives. The following are just a few examples, taken directly from the outcomes and strategies developed by the Vanguard College Team. In Organizational Culture, it will create an ongoing framework for creating and sustaining a culture of connectedness, and will do so in a way that builds connection focused directly on student learning. It will use technology to increase connectedness and institutionalize the most successful college-wide innovation we have yet attempted. In Staff Recruitment and Development, it will create substantial and ongoing professional development focused explicitly on student learning, link professional development activities directly to the central College priority of student learning, and create a venue to effectively share the language of the learning college. In Technology, it will directly apply technology to improving student learning, and in the process directly address the Information Technology Competency, which is embedded in the Core Skills, and greatly expand the utility and application of student portals through the Digital Portfolio. In Underprepared Students, it will increase the impact of assessment and advising on student success, greatly expand assessment beyond grading, and facilitate more effective placement. In fact, the Vanguard College Team has proposed the Digital Portfolio as a strategy for reaching the Underprepared Students objective. And, as the Vanguard College Team has recognized, the centerpiece of the Vanguard College objectives is Learning Outcomes. How can we become a learning college unless we constantly seek to discover what our students are learning, and how to support them in learning more and better? This proposal moves forward on almost every one of the Vanguard College outcomes and strategies for Learning Outcomes. And without this project, or something very similar, movement on most of them will simply stop.

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Funding

We plan to seek grants from the Chancellor's Office of the California Community Colleges and from the Federal Fund for the Improvement of Post-secondary Education (FIPSE) to support ongoing development. We are also actively exploring other funding sources and possible consortia with other colleges to achieve economies of scale and to defray the costs of development. However, external support depends in every instance on evidence of a long-term commitment by the College and its leaders to the project. We have reached a crucial point in the development of outcomes assessment at Palomar. The College is now, almost exclusively as a result of ALP�s work, a national leader in outcomes assessment. We face the choice of assuming the responsibility that comes with leadership or sacrificing our role in the vanguard of education reform and being quickly surpassed by others. We believe that the vision we have developed at Palomar is distinctive in that it is focused on student learning and uses assessment to serve students above all else. We hope that the institution will carry on and expand the work so well begun and build on this solid foundation.

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