In this article, the author reviews King and Kitchener's "Reflective Judgment Interview" ("RJI"). On the "RJI" website Patricia King notes that a widely espoused outcome of college is the ability to draw reasonable conclusions about complex issues based on incomplete and/or conflicting information. Drawing on the works of Dewey, Piaget, and Perry,…

The purpose of this study was to use journal feedback from student teachers to understand and document how well the Physical Education-Teacher Education (PETE) program prepares teacher candidates in relation to the three primary goals of the PETE program. Analysis of the journals revealed areas of merit and concern for the PETE faculty. The most…

The purpose of this article is to describe a procedure that has been used successfully to evaluate the critical thinking (CT) abilities of a population of undergraduates having limited proficiency in the English language. The results of this study demonstrate that it is possible to obtain reliable evaluations of CT skills in undergraduates who…

The degree specification project is a simple, yet pragmatic process of crystallizing the "identity" of the degrees offered in each discipline. In other words, what should students expect to have in the way of skills, knowledge, and abilities once they complete a degree in a specific discipline? Faculty first articulate three to five degree-level…

When the final report of Secretary of Education Margaret Spelling's Commission on the Future of Higher Education was released in September 2006, the call for higher education to focus on measuring and reporting "meaningful student learning outcomes" was a major charge. The report's suggestion that some standardized tests might be used to collect…

A persistent conflict between assessment professionals and faculty members in the humanities seems to focus inevitably on resistance to the concept of interrater reliability. While humanities faculty are often willing to engage in course-embedded assessment that uses some type of scoring rubric, when the demand for agreement in scoring is…

Learning communities have been in operation at Temple University (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) since 1993. The goals of the program focus primarily on the creation of stronger social bonds among students as well as enhanced interaction within the classroom. The learning community approach attempts to foster an intellectual environment within which…

In 1998, the Utah State Board of Regents ordered a sample administration of American College Testing's Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency (CAAP), a test of general knowledge, for Utah System of Higher Education (USHE) students. The pilot test was administered to 3,148 Utah college students who were completing their sophomore year at one…

In 1997, the Oregon legislature directed the Oregon University System (OUS) to develop and implement performance measures and indicators with respect to broad policy goals of access, quality, employability, and cost-effectiveness. An advisory committee of representatives of the state's public colleges and universities was formed to shape the…

The United States Military Academy (USMA) provides cadets with a liberal education designed to develop versatile and critical thinkers who can adapt to the professional and ethical challenges they will confront. Cadets' moral development is integrated throughout their West Point experience, to the point of being included as one of the USMA's…

Increasingly, colleges and universities are offering online courses using commercial course packaging. One of the most popular courseware programs is Blackboard. This article describes research that employed a two-pronged approach to investigate how education faculty used Blackboard courseware to facilitate student competence in using technology.…