To support colleges and universities in enhancing student’s high-order skills and essential learning outcomes (rather than solely content knowledge), AAC&U created 16 open educational resources for assessment—the VALUE (Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education) rubrics—to assess what students know and can do. VALUE is a campus-based assessment approach developed and led by the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) as part of its Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) initiative in 2007. The mission of AAC&U is to “advance the vitality and public standing of liberal education by making quality and equity the foundation for excellence in undergraduate education in service to democracy.”
There are 16 freely-available (and easily modifiable) VALUE rubrics: Inquiry and Analysis, Critical Thinking, Creative Thinking, Written Communication, Oral Communication, Reading, Quantitative Literacy, Informational Literacy, Teamwork, Problem Solving, Civic Engagement, Intercultural Knowledge and Competence, Ethical Reasoning, Foundations and Skills for Lifelong learning, and Global Learning. These rubrics break new ground by assessing learning outcomes using actual work that students produce during their curricular and co-curricular journeys, as opposed to relying on standardized assessments which have often been criticized as inequitable. Moreover, they are designed to enable students to self-reflect and self-assess their own work alongside their instructors. Since 2014, over 615,000 individual VALUE rubrics have been freely downloaded by users from more than 2,744 colleges and universities in over 141 countries.
In this video, we will present two open educational resources—the VALUE rubrics and the VALUE ADD (Assignment Design and Diagnostic) tools—through an equitable lens focused on ensuring students’ learning is reliably and validly reflected, and to determine whether and how well students are meeting graduation level achievement in learning outcomes that both employers and faculty consider essential. We will focus on displaying ways in which higher education faculty, administrators, and assessment leaders can utilize these two freely available and modifiable resources in their regular assessment process.
After participating in this session, attendees will be able to:
- Access and download all 16 VALUE rubrics and the Critical Thinking VALUE ADD tool
- Understand and modify any VALUE rubric
- Understand how to use the VALUE ADD tool(s)
- Learn about VALUE rubric training opportunities
- Understand how to apply VALUE rubrics in multiple contexts such as across general education curriculum, within academic degree programs, as part of first-year experiences, as well as for accreditation purposes
