In this article, we describe teacher educators' collaboration for coherence around social justice teacher education in preparation for a national accreditation review. Specifically, we illuminate how we cultivated an inquiry stance and critical conversations to build a safe and trusting community, generate locally meaningful values, and…

This chapter describes how assessment of co-curricular student learning outcomes can be used as part of the institutional accreditation process and the opportunities institutional researchers and student affairs educators have to collaborate in those efforts.

This article describes the synthesis of the NCATE PDS Standards, the NAPDS Nine Essentials and the CAEP Standards to create a rubric that can be used to help PDS stakeholders develop, refine, and evaluate their partnerships. Implications and future directions on how to use the rubric are also shared.

The quality of e-learning can be defined in many different ways, reflecting different stakeholders and the complexity of the systems and processes used in higher education. These different conceptions of quality can be mutually contradictory and, while politically significant, may also be beyond the direct control or influence of institutional…

The article grounds the structure of the external evaluation of colleges at the level of the non-university higher education sector, and it reveals the problems met in this process as well as possibilities for their solution: the phenomenon of the external evaluation of colleges is discussed and its concept is presented; the external evaluation…

The state of higher education today is one of change and stasis. Economic vulnerability, globalization, technological innovation, and an increasingly competitive market underlie the need for change in higher education. At the same time, there are strong and stubborn forces at work supporting the status quo. Though daunting, institutions of higher…

In this article, the authors offer a descriptive essay outlining the framework and processes of a five-year institutional renewal effort at Bank Street College of Education. Extended the opportunity to participate in the "Teachers for a New Era" (TNE) initiative, a multi-year, multi-million dollar effort to enhance and "radically…

Student success is at the heart of both institutional effectiveness and the community college mission, yet measuring such success at community colleges is problematic. This article highlights three efforts to grapple with this problem--a multistate work group of system- and state-level policymakers to create an improved set of student success…

The need for a flexible and versatile workforce that is constantly learning and upgrading its skills has led to a continual demand for courses in which employees are re-trained and updated on a lifelong basis. Students and workers now have to be prepared for a labour market in which they can be expected to change jobs many times, and they need to…

This report highlights the experiences of the 33 members of CIC's (Council of Independent Colleges) Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) Consortium over the past three years as they used the CLA to measure student learning outcomes. The CLA instrument assesses how the college experience helps students develop such "higher order" cognitive skills…

As many experienced board members know, given the national debate in recent years over institutional accountability, learning--the heart of the educational enterprise--is often treated as a by-product of other more measurable processes. The fact is, no matter how excellent the curricula, no matter how stellar the faculty, no matter how talented…

"Building Institutional Capacity for Data-Informed Decision Making" is the third installment of the Cutting Edge series, which aims to help colleges engage faculty, scale successful interventions, and create a strong culture of evidence through use of data to strengthen their institutional change and student success efforts. Though the…

This article reports on the New Zealand education quality assurance and school monitoring system, including its framework, and responsibilities of agencies. It first gives an outline of the education system in New Zealand, and then introduces the role of school charters and levels of schooling. To ensure the quality of schools, the methods of…

Discusses the notion of continuous quality measurement for outcomes assessment in higher education and describes a technology-based continuous quality measurement system (QMS) that has been developed and implemented at the University of Louisville. Discusses the role of QMS in the university's quality improvement scheme and its initial impacts on…

The National Community College Benchmark Project (NCCBP) provides community colleges with a system to report data on key learning outcomes and indicators of institutional effectiveness and to compare their data with national norms and data from selected peer institutions. This chapter describes the development, current features, and anticipated…