This practical guide to outcomes-based assessment in student affairs is designed to help readers meet the growing demand for accountability and for demonstrating student learning. The authors offer a framework for implementing the assessment of student learning and development and pragmatic advice on the strategies most appropriate for the readers’ particular circumstances. Beginning with a brief history of assessment, the book explains how to effectively engage in outcomes-based assessment, presents strategies for addressing the range of challenges and barriers student affairs practitioners are likely to face, addresses institutional, divisional, and departmental collaboration, and considers future developments in the assessment of student success. One feature of the book is its use of real case studies that both illustrate current best practices in student affairs assessment that illuminate theory and provide examples of application. The cases allow the authors to demonstrate that there are several approaches to evaluating student learning and development within student affairs; illustrating how practice may vary according to institutional type, institutional culture, and available resources. The authors explain how to set goals, write outcomes, describe the range of assessment methods available, discuss criteria for evaluating outcomes-based assessment, and provide steps and questions to consider in designing the reflection and institutional assessment processes, as well as how to effectively utilize and disseminate results. Their expert knowledge, tips, and insights will enable readers to implement outcomes-based assessment in ways that best meet the needs of their own unique campus environments.

The key to success, our culture tells us, is a combination of talent and hard work. Why then, do high schools that supposedly subscribe to this view send students to college at such dramatically different rates? Why do students from one school succeed while students from another struggle? To the usual answer—an imbalance in resources—this book adds a far more subtle and complicated explanation. Defining Student Success shows how different schools foster dissimilar and sometimes conflicting ideas about what it takes to succeed—ideas that do more to preserve the status quo than to promote upward mobility. Lisa Nunn’s study of three public high schools reveals how students’ beliefs about their own success are shaped by their particular school environment and reinforced by curriculum and teaching practices. While American culture broadly defines success as a product of hard work or talent (at school, intelligence is the talent that matters most), Nunn shows that each school refines and adapts this American cultural wisdom in its own distinct way—reflecting the sensibilities and concerns of the people who inhabit each school. While one school fosters the belief that effort is all it takes to succeed, another fosters the belief that hard work will only get you so far because you have to be smart enough to master course concepts. Ultimately, Nunn argues that these school-level adaptations of cultural ideas about success become invisible advantages and disadvantages for students’ college-going futures. Some schools’ definitions of success match seamlessly with elite college admissions’ definition of the ideal college applicant, while others more closely align with the expectations of middle or low-tier institutions of higher education. With its insights into the transmission of ideas of success from society to school to student, this provocative work should prompt a reevaluation of the culture of secondary education. Only with a thorough understanding of this process will we ever find more consistent means of inculcating success, by any measure.

For success in school and life, students need more than proficiency in academic subjects and good scores on tests; those goals should form the floor, not the ceiling, of their education. To truly thrive, students need to develop attributes that aren’t typically measured on standardized tests. In this lively, engaging book by veteran school leader Thomas R. Hoerr, educators will learn how to foster the “Formative Five” success skills that today’s students need, including Empathy: learning to see the world through others’ perspectives. Self-control: cultivating the abilities to focus and delay self-gratification. Integrity: recognizing right from wrong and practicing ethical behavior. Embracing diversity: recognizing and appreciating human differences. Grit: persevering in the face of challenge. When educators engage students in understanding and developing these five skills, they change mindsets and raise expectations for student learning. As an added benefit, they see significant improvements in school and classroom culture. With specific suggestions and strategies, The Formative Five will help teachers, principals, and anyone else who has a stake in education prepare their students—and themselves—for a future in which the only constant will be change.

Although partnerships between academic affairs and student affairs are widely recognized as important for student learning and institutional effectiveness, the higher education community tends to discuss and applaud such collaborations without actually implementing them. This issue of New Directions for Student Services presents case studies of academic and student affairs partnerships that have been successfully put into practice at a variety of institutions, in areas such as service learning, the core curriculum, and residential learning communities. The authors offer academic and student affairs professionals practical strategies for forming collaborations that enhance learning and promote student success. The concluding chapter presents a set of guiding principles to use in assessing the effectiveness of partnerships and the climate for collaboration at individual institutions.This is the 87th issue of the quarterly journal New Directions for Student Services. For more information on the series, please see the New Directions for Student Services page.

This resource provides an action plan for understanding what a student knows and how to build from it. It shows teachers how to integrate formative assessment, student metacognition, and motivational strategies to make goal setting an integral instructional strategy. It weaves research and case studies with practical strategies to demonstrate how goal setting, with clear learning intentions and scaffolded teacher support, can lead to high learning growth and student agency.

Student Success in College describes policies, programs, and practices that a diverse set of institutions have used to enhance student achievement. This book clearly shows the benefits of student learning and educational effectiveness that can be realized when these conditions are present. Based on the Documenting Effective Educational Practice (DEEP) project from the Center for Postsecondary Research at Indiana University, this book provides concrete examples from twenty institutions that other colleges and universities can learn from and adapt to help create a success-oriented campus culture and learning environment.

Carol Ann Tomlinson and Tonya R. Moon take an in-depth look at assessment and show how differentiation can improve the process in all grade levels and subject areas. After discussing differentiation in general, the authors focus on how differentiation applies to various forms of assessment--pre-assessment, formative assessment, and summative assessment--and to grading and report cards. Readers learn how differentiation can --Capture student interest and increase motivation --Clarify teachers' understanding about what is most important to teach --Enhance students' and teachers' belief in student learning capacity; and --Help teachers understand their students' individual similarities and differences so they can reach more students, more effectively Throughout, Tomlinson and Moon emphasize the importance of maintaining a consistent focus on the essential knowledge, understandings, and skills that all students must acquire, no matter what their starting point. Detailed scenarios illustrate how assessment differentiation can occur in three realms (student readiness, interest, and learning style or preference) and how it can improve assessment validity and reliability and decrease errors and teacher bias. Grounded in research and the authors' teaching experience, Assessment and Student Success in a Differentiated Classroom outlines a common-sense approach that is both thoughtful and practical, and that empowers teachers and students to discover, strive for, and achieve their true potential. This is PDF Format E-book: ISBN 978-1-4166-1773-0