Serendipity35

The Association of American Colleges and Universities is conducting a project named VALUE, an acronym for Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education.(Background information about the project is online at aacu.org/value)

Carol Geary Schneider's editorial "The Proof Is in the Portfolio" in Liberal Education offers a good lead-in to why eportfolios can help us to document student learning and achievement.

She talks about the inadequacies of assessment by standardized testing.

...as Georgetown University economist Tony Carnevale has repeatedly pointed out, SAT scores are so tightly correlated with family income that higher education would have gotten the same level of (modest)predictive validity if it had used family income instead of tests in selection screening.

Schneider points to eportfolios as an accountability strategy.

...e-portfolios enable us to see what a student is working on over time, to discern an emerging sense of purpose and direction, and to review samples of writing, research projects, and creative work as well as progress in integrating learning across multiple levels of schooling and multiple areas of study and experience. An e-portfolio also opens windows into a student’s field-based assignments by creating opportunities to present supervisor evaluations or even videos showing real-world performance. They can be sampled, using rubrics, for external reporting."

The rubrics interest me for the purposes of our own eportfolio project at PCCC. I was able to obtain them from Milt Hakel via my own Epsilen eportfolio account where they are posted. The VALUE project is developing them as tools for meaningful, student-centered assessment.

Fourteen metarubrics have been drafted and are now undergoing field testing at many universities, colleges, and community colleges.  They cover AAC&U's Essential Learning Outcomes and the list itself is a good indication of what many programs are focusing on these days. (7 of the 14 are key to the PCCC Writing Initiative, for example)

1. Civic knowledge and engagement—local and global
2. Creative thinking
3. Critical thinking
4. Ethical reasoning and action
5. Foundations and skills for lifelong learning
6. Information literacy
7. Inquiry and analysis
8. Integrative learning
9. Intercultural knowledge and competence
10. Oral communication
11. Problem solving
12. Quantitative literacy
13. Teamwork
14. Written communication

Rubrics are hardly cutting edge, or Web 2.0, and may not require much technology, but they are important tools. The VALUE metarubrics were created using the criteria most often found in the many campus rubrics that they collected and so they represent a carefully considered summary of criteria widely considered critical to judging the quality of student work in that outcome area.