This book is about student success and how to support and improve it. It takes as its point of departure that we--as faculty, assessment directors, student affairs professionals, and staff--reflect together in a purposeful and informed way about how our teaching, curricula, the co-curriculum, and assessment work in concert to support and improve student learning and success. It also requires that we do so in collaboration with our colleagues and our students for the rich insights that we gain from them. Conversational in style, this book offers a wide variety of illustrations of how your peers are putting assessment into practice in ways that are meaningful to them and their institutions, and that lead to improved student learning. The authors provide rich guidance for activities ranging from everyday classroom teaching and assessment to using assessment to improve programs and entire institutions. The authors envisage individual faculty at four-year institutions and community colleges as their main audience, whether those faculty are focused on their own classes or support their colleagues through leadership roles in assessment. If you plan to remain focused on your own courses and students, you will find that those sections of this book will help you better understand why and how assessment leaders do what they do, which in turn will make your participation in assessment more engaging and increase your expertise in facilitating student learning. Because the authors also aim to strengthen connections between the curriculum and co-curriculum and include examples of co-curricular assessment, student affairs professionals and staff interested in doing the same will also find ideas in this book relevant to their work. Opening with a chapter on equity in assessment practice, so critical to learning from and benefitting our diverse students, the authors guide you through the development and use of learning outcomes, the design of assignments with attention to clear prompts and rubrics, and the achievement of alignment and coherence in pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment to better support student engagement, achievement and success. The chapter on using student evidence for improvement offers support, resources, and recommendations for doing so, and demonstrates exciting uses of student wisdom. The book concludes by emphasizing the importance of reflection in assessment practices--offering powerful examples and strategies for professional development--and by describing appropriate, creative, and effective approaches for communicating assessment information with attention to purpose and audience.

This book is about student success and how to support and improve it. It takes as its point of departure that we--as faculty, assessment directors, student affairs professionals, and staff--reflect together in a purposeful and informed way about how our teaching, curricula, the co-curriculum, and assessment work in concert to support and improve student learning and success. It also requires that we do so in collaboration with our colleagues and our students for the rich insights that we gain from them. Conversational in style, this book offers a wide variety of illustrations of how your peers are putting assessment into practice in ways that are meaningful to them and their institutions, and that lead to improved student learning. The authors provide rich guidance for activities ranging from everyday classroom teaching and assessment to using assessment to improve programs and entire institutions. The authors envisage individual faculty at four-year institutions and community colleges as their main audience, whether those faculty are focused on their own classes or support their colleagues through leadership roles in assessment. If you plan to remain focused on your own courses and students, you will find that those sections of this book will help you better understand why and how assessment leaders do what they do, which in turn will make your participation in assessment more engaging and increase your expertise in facilitating student learning. Because the authors also aim to strengthen connections between the curriculum and co-curriculum and include examples of co-curricular assessment, student affairs professionals and staff interested in doing the same will also find ideas in this book relevant to their work. Opening with a chapter on equity in assessment practice, so critical to learning from and benefitting our diverse students, the authors guide you through the development and use of learning outcomes, the design of assignments with attention to clear prompts and rubrics, and the achievement of alignment and coherence in pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment to better support student engagement, achievement and success. The chapter on using student evidence for improvement offers support, resources, and recommendations for doing so, and demonstrates exciting uses of student wisdom. The book concludes by emphasizing the importance of reflection in assessment practices--offering powerful examples and strategies for professional development--and by describing appropriate, creative, and effective approaches for communicating assessment information with attention to purpose and audience.

Reading Across the Disciplines offers a collection of twelve essays detailing a range of approaches to dealing with students' reading needs at the college level. Transforming reading in higher education requires more than individual faculty members working on SoTL projects in their particular fields. Teachers need to consider reading across the disciplines. In this collection, authors from Australia and North America, teaching in a variety of disciplines, explore reading in undergraduate courses, doctoral seminars, and faculty development activities. By paying attention to the particular classroom and placing those observations in conversation with scholarly literature, they create new knowledge about reading in higher education from disciplinary and cross-disciplinary perspectives. Reading Across the Disciplines demonstrates how existing research about reading can be applied to specific classroom contexts, offering models for faculty members whose own research interests may lie elsewhere but who believe in the importance of reading.

Reading Across the Disciplines offers a collection of twelve essays detailing a range of approaches to dealing with students' reading needs at the college level. Transforming reading in higher education requires more than individual faculty members working on SoTL projects in their particular fields. Teachers need to consider reading across the disciplines. In this collection, authors from Australia and North America, teaching in a variety of disciplines, explore reading in undergraduate courses, doctoral seminars, and faculty development activities. By paying attention to the particular classroom and placing those observations in conversation with scholarly literature, they create new knowledge about reading in higher education from disciplinary and cross-disciplinary perspectives. Reading Across the Disciplines demonstrates how existing research about reading can be applied to specific classroom contexts, offering models for faculty members whose own research interests may lie elsewhere but who believe in the importance of reading.