The Connections 2013 Conference takes participants “beyond the obvious” by helping participants identify, assess, and document student learning and unit effectiveness outside the traditional bricks-and-mortar model. Sessions will demonstrate how evidence can and must be captured across campuses by faculty and co-curricular professionals who are usually in anecdotal agreement that learning and success happens – often to a significant degree – outside the lecture hall. Sessions will include such topics as strategies for assessing learning within “high impact practices” (Kuh, 2008) such as undergraduate research, learning communities, internships, and first year seminars; capturing evidence of student learning in the advising process; ways non-academic units within Student Affairs can demonstrate their contribution to the cognitive growth of students; and tools for demonstrating that students are not just learning but thriving in online and hybrid classroom environments.
Furthermore, this year’s theme takes us beyond a singular focus on measuring student learning to address the pressures campuses face for more and better data regarding the performance of campus support units. Innovative uses of technology and common sense approaches to administrative assessment and evaluation represent a new area of focus at the 2013 Conference; emerging best practices for administrative assessment will be highlighted.
Purposefully small in size, Connections 2013 is designed to help foster a community of practice that brings assessment-minded individuals together across geographic, disciplinary, and institutional boundaries. As always, it is the hope and expectation that conference attendees will engage and contribute their wisdom to the conversations taking place within each session, at each meal, and within each hallway interaction.
It is the primary goal of this first-of-its-kind partnership between Virginia Tech and WEAVE to demonstrate that if you do high-quality assessment work – from the design of your assessment strategies to the technology you employ to deliver your results – and stay true to and celebrate the teaching and learning taking place on campus, accountability demands almost satisfy themselves. In other words, the conference will provide participants with best practices for not only conducting authentic, learner-centered assessment, but also best practices for using technology to translate that work for regional and/or professional accreditation demands in such a way that even the most skeptical will find legitimate.
