As institutions of higher education evolve and adapt to meet the increasing needs of their communities, faculty are faced with the choice of where and how to employ their time and expertise. To advance and encourage partnerships between institutions and their communities, academic reward structures must be designed in ways that support those who…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to understand student experiences of authentically assessed community partnership projects and reflect on authentic assessment from a social and environmental sustainability perspective. Design/methodology/approach: The authors present an elaborated case study including graduate-level courses at a university…

Policymakers, accreditation bodies, students and their families, and other stakeholders increasingly press institutions of higher education to provide clear evidence of their value. Institutions emphasize their status as a public good claiming their role in developing human capital and informed citizens, enabling social class mobility, and…

Community engagement is recognized as a high-impact practice in higher education. However, while best practices in engagement have been broadly accepted, standard metrics for engagement across institutions have not yet been established. The purpose of this research study was to explore the relationship between community engagement and a variety of…

This perspective paper describes the strategic development of evaluation and organizational learning programs focused on building core knowledge and skills at a university with high research activity. New program development allows academic leaders to introduce relevant and cutting-edge knowledge to students. Nevertheless, the program development…

The Transdisciplinary Research, Equity and Engagement (TREE) Center for Advancing Behavioral Health partners with community leaders to translate research evidence into practice and policy for behavioral health equity. Equity-oriented research centers such as the TREE Center present evaluation challenges and, correspondingly, offer rich…

Community-engaged scholars, practitioners, and community partners often find the language of community engagement challenging. Words like "participate," "collaborate," "partner," or "engage" fail to convey who in a community-university partnership has voice and authority in decision-making and responsibility…

This study explores the indicators of university-community engagement and their implications to evaluation. Through an examination of 47 studies, we validate that university-community engagement can unfold in many ways and impact many stakeholders, and that, evaluation focusing only on university perspectives might leave out the community…

Grow Your Own (GYO) programs are designed to recruit high school students, paraeducators, community organizers and parents, and/or career changers from the local community to join the educator workforce. When considering the nontraditional teacher pools that may enter the profession through GYO programs, commonly held assumptions about who…

Scholarship addressing public and community engagement in tenure and promotion often invokes Ernest Boyer's landmark 1990 report, "Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate," and goes on to lament the lack of progress made in the three decades that have followed. This review intervenes: We synthesize extant scholarship on…

Needs Assessment and Planning Health Promotion Programs is a senior- level online course for students seeking a bachelor's degree in health promotion. Historically this course has had the learning objective of helping students demonstrate an understanding of how to plan the assessment process, from the analysis of a planning model through to the…

Centers for Teaching and Learning (CTLs) are important change agents on campus with strategies that are unique and impactful--but sometimes unarticulated or misaligned. In this wide-ranging book, Mary C. Wright maps the landscape of 1,200+ CTLs in the United States through a unique approach: by conducting complex web searches to identify and…

At some future point, when a definitive history of the assessment movement is written, one of the most frequently cited, influential publications will be "Assessment Update" ("AU"). Since 1989, this bimonthly newsletter has been published by Jossey-Bass in partnership with Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis…

This paper is part of a series investigating the implementation of competency education. The purpose of the paper is to explore how districts and schools can redesign grading systems to best help students to excel in academics and to gain the skills that are needed to be successful in college, the community, and the workplace. In order to make the…

Evaluative instruments designed to assess a university's or college's institutionalization of service-learning practices have been devised and widely utilized. These instruments often come with assumptions about aligning data with decision making. To date, attempts to document community engagement practices within a department or an entire…