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Examples of Assessment by Institution |
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Hamilton College, through a grant from the Mellon Foundation, has undertaken a series of research initiatives in the assessment of liberal arts education. Research has been conducted by a part-time director, Sociology Professor Dan Chambliss, a number of faculty working groups, scores of student research assistants, and several outside consultants. There are a number of components to the research, but the primary ones were a panel study and a writing study. The panel study used an interview protocol to track 100 randomly sampled students from the Class of 2005 on a wide variety of issues about their experience at Hamilton College. The writing study utilized an archive of several thousand student papers, collected over a five-year period, from a wide variety of classes and students. Outside evaluators read and evaluated the collection of papers, with the goal to understand, through an objective evaluation scheme, the extent to which our students' writing actually improves (or does not) during their time at Hamilton, and on what criteria it improves (or not).
While the Mellon Assessment Project has been the cornerstone of Hamilton’s assessment program, the College is diversifying its assessment portfolio through current participation in other national studies on learning outcomes including the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education and a Teagle Foundation-funded study on assessing undergraduate outcomes within disciplinary contexts.
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Hamilton College |
