Educational Research and Evaluation at Alverno College

Alverno College’s Educational Research and Evaluation department (ERE) collaborates with departments, faculty, and staff to promote diverse modes of inquiry for reflecting on practice and to ensure the quality of evaluation activities in the college. ERE conducts studies, on behalf of the college and promotes a scholarship of teaching, learning, and assessment that integrates theory, research, practice, and policy. In collaboration with Alverno’s Institute for Educational Outreach and Research Center for Women and Girls, ERE’s services to the community beyond Alverno include developing and carrying out evaluations for educational programs from across the educational spectrum.

Conversations That Make us Better

Alverno’s approach to educational research and evaluation is sensitive to context and mission. In our dialogue with educators at other institutions, we have found some broad points of discussion about our own and others’ educational practices that assist in thinking across educational practices. We have also found that educational research, evaluation, and practice can be an integrated and dynamic learning system when an institution articulates how educational principles and values are shared across its diverse activities. At Alverno, identifiable structures that promote sustained dialogue, such as the Research and Evaluation Council, ensure both coherence and continuous improvement. At the same time, responsibility for review of program, curriculum, and institution-wide effectiveness lies with departments, faculty, and staff across the college in a community of inquiry.

Curriculum-Embedded Assessment of Student Learning Outcomes

At Alverno, the ability-based curriculum is an educational framework that dynamically supports all levels of student, program, and institutional assessment. It is critical in our dynamic approach that curriculum-embedded assessment begins with a focus on fostering and documenting individual student learning in relation to how the abilities are defined across the curriculum in general education and within the major. It is also critical that curriculum-embedded assessment extends its purposes by assisting Alverno educators to examine patterns across student performances on a particular assessment (and in relation to other assessments) to draw inferences about how well students are achieving learning outcomes at the level of the course, program, and institution. By taking this path that extends assessment purposes from its grounding in individual student learning, we, as a college, ensure that we learn together and stay mutually connected to our educational mission.

Investigation of Learning Principles and Assumptions

ERE’s signature research includes investigation of the assumption that collegiate learning connects with how graduates conduct their civic, professional and personal lives. This research serves to interrogate and further inform the broad educational assumptions and principles that we collectively hold as a college. It is also contributing to adult developmental theory. For example, ERE staff wrote a chapter on “Holistic development, learning and performance in college and beyond” for The Oxford Handbook of Reciprocal Adult Learning and Development (2011).