- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Frontispiece
- Foreword: Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century
- Preface
- I What We Teach and Why
- 1 Why We Need a New Kind of Higher Education
- 2 Practical Knowledge
- 3 Foundations of the Curriculum
- 4 A New Look at General Education
- 5 Multimodal Communications and Effective Communication
- 6 Formal Analyses and Critical Thinking
- 7 Empirical Analyses and Creative Thinking
- 8 Complex Systems and Effective Interaction
- 9 A New Look at Majors and Concentrations
- II How We Teach
- 10 Unlearning to Learn
- 11 The Science of Learning: Mechanisms and Principles
- 12 Fully Active Learning
- 13 A New Team-Teaching Approach to Structured Learning
- 14 Teaching from Lesson Plans
- 15 The Active Learning Forum
- 16 Building Lesson Plans for Twenty-First-Century Active Learning
- 17 Assessing Student Learning
- III Creating a New Institution
- 18 Building a New Brand
- 19 Global Outreach: Communicating a New Vision
- 20 An Admissions Process for the Twenty-First Century
- 21 Multifaceted Acculturation: An Immersive, Community-Based Multicultural Education
- 22 Experiential Learning: The City as a Campus and Human Network
- 23 A Global Community by Design
- 24 Mental Health Services in a Diverse, Twenty-First-Century University
- 25 The Minerva Professional Development Agency
- 26 Accreditation: Official Recognition of a New Vision of Higher Education
- 27 A Novel Business and Operating Model
- Afterword: For the Sake of the World
- Appendix A: Habits of Mind and Foundational Concepts
- Appendix B: Mission, Principles, and Practices
- Editors and Contributors
- Index
Assessing Student Learning
Assessing Student Learning
- Chapter:
- (p.239) 17 Assessing Student Learning
- Source:
- Building the Intentional University
- Author(s):
Rena Levitt
Ari Bader-Natal
Vicki Chandler
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
This chapter describes the tools and procedures we have developed to assess students’ intellectual progress at Minerva. These tools and procedures rely on six design principles: implement learning outcomes; grade consistently; provide feedback in context; aggregate meaningfully; show and share progress; and supplement with external measures. In general, faculty use rubrics to score how well the students have mastered and applied the learning outcomes during the video-recorded classes and in their assignments; these scores, often accompanied by explanatory comments, provide significant, regular feedback. We developed tools to help students and faculty explore the assessment data and to know how well students are doing in each class throughout the semester. Minerva’s unique requirement that faculty assess students on how well they apply Habits of Mind and Foundational Concepts in every class, across all four years, led us to develop novel tools to record and aggregate individual assessments across multiple courses. Finally, we used externally developed tests to provide summative data on whether our students were actually learning.
Keywords: cross-course assessment, learning outcomes, annotation-based feedback, rubric design, longitudinal assessment
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- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Frontispiece
- Foreword: Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century
- Preface
- I What We Teach and Why
- 1 Why We Need a New Kind of Higher Education
- 2 Practical Knowledge
- 3 Foundations of the Curriculum
- 4 A New Look at General Education
- 5 Multimodal Communications and Effective Communication
- 6 Formal Analyses and Critical Thinking
- 7 Empirical Analyses and Creative Thinking
- 8 Complex Systems and Effective Interaction
- 9 A New Look at Majors and Concentrations
- II How We Teach
- 10 Unlearning to Learn
- 11 The Science of Learning: Mechanisms and Principles
- 12 Fully Active Learning
- 13 A New Team-Teaching Approach to Structured Learning
- 14 Teaching from Lesson Plans
- 15 The Active Learning Forum
- 16 Building Lesson Plans for Twenty-First-Century Active Learning
- 17 Assessing Student Learning
- III Creating a New Institution
- 18 Building a New Brand
- 19 Global Outreach: Communicating a New Vision
- 20 An Admissions Process for the Twenty-First Century
- 21 Multifaceted Acculturation: An Immersive, Community-Based Multicultural Education
- 22 Experiential Learning: The City as a Campus and Human Network
- 23 A Global Community by Design
- 24 Mental Health Services in a Diverse, Twenty-First-Century University
- 25 The Minerva Professional Development Agency
- 26 Accreditation: Official Recognition of a New Vision of Higher Education
- 27 A Novel Business and Operating Model
- Afterword: For the Sake of the World
- Appendix A: Habits of Mind and Foundational Concepts
- Appendix B: Mission, Principles, and Practices
- Editors and Contributors
- Index