How do students define success? Surely, they have many of the same goals as policy makers and institutional leaders, but maybe they are aiming for something more. Since students are partners in higher education, the authors thought it was important to learn what they had to say. This led to a student success project for the Higher Education Data…

In its purest form, the purpose of assessment is to use evidence to give an account of and improve student learning, but assessment is rarely practiced in its purest form. For many staff and faculty in higher education, assessment is something they are asked or, more likely, required to do. The reason is because some external entity has required…

In higher education it is sometimes hard to ignore the doom and gloom combination of shrinking budgets and expanding accountability. Education is also in the midst of a conversation about teaching and learning that encompasses a range of innovative pedagogies, assessments, and high impact practices. Organizations such as the Association of…

Funded by the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts (CILA) at Wabash College, the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education (WNS) is a multi-institution, multi-year, longitudinal study designed to identify the academic and non-academic collegiate experiences that foster liberal learning. This article describes how the study was done and…

The publication of Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa's influential new book, "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses," the findings of which were summarized in an article by the same authors in the March/April "Change," has caused a national furor centering around their multi-institutional findings that the…

Accreditors, speakers at assessment conferences, and campus leaders all decry the fact that too few faculty are closing the loop--that is, studying assessment findings to see what improvements might be suggested and taking the appropriate steps to make them. This is difficult enough with locally developed measures; adding the need to interpret…

The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), one of the most widely used annual surveys of undergraduates in the country, is specifically designed to assess the extent to which college students are engaged in empirically vetted good practices in undergraduate education. One of the major assumptions of the NSSE is that in measuring the extent…