Teagle Study
Measuring Intellectual Development and Civic Engagement through Value-Added Assessment
In March 2005, six selective, Phi-Beta Kappa liberal arts colleges received a $300,000 grant from the Teagle Foundation of New York to study three areas of student development central to a quality education: writing, critical thinking and civil engagement.
The study will help the six schools determine how much student students grow in these areas, whether some educational approaches lead to greater student development than others and how these areas of student growth interrelate.
The schools involved in the study — Alma, Augustana, Gustavus Adolphus, Illinois Wesleyan, Luther and Wittenberg — all strive to foster student growth in these areas, seeking to educate the whole person. The schools believe that a liberal-arts education is good preparation for a productive life, not only in a successful career, but also as an active, contributing member in the larger community.
What is a value-added assessment?
"Value-added assessment" seeks to determine if a school has helped students improve in a specific area, and, if so, how much they have improved. A value-added approach to assessing writing skill might include reading representative samples of freshman and senior papers, the hope being that the seniors' scores will be higher. Higher scores would measure the "value added" by the college. Senior scores that weren't higher would prompt the college to look for ways to improve writing instruction.
All the schools in the Teagle Study do assessment to tell where they are doing a good job for their students and where they need to improve. The Teagle Study explores student growth by focusing on skills central to a quality college education using a combination of professionally developed national tests along with assessment done by faculty from each school.
First Year
During this first year of the study, we will collect from participating students:
- The Collegiate Learning Assessment
- "Case-building"/argumentative papers from fall and spring
- National Survey of Student Engagement
- College Student Survey
Faculty from all six institutions will meet in June 2006 to assess representative samples of student writing.
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