Assessment for Competencies Needed AFTER Graduation:

1. Assessment for Competencies Needed AFTER Graduation: Liberal Arts more than a training ground for discipline thinkers! David Finney, Champlain College Vicky Gunn, University of Glasgow Donna Qualters, Tufts University

2. Goals for the session: • Discuss the role of Liberal Arts Post Graduation • Highlight the importance of assessment of liberal arts competencies for post graduation preparation • Share ideas from University of Glasgow • Explore the opportunities and challenges in the US to learn from the Glasgow experience

3. Let’s get started! • At your table – think of the your own education and then think of the position you currently hold. • List for yourself • Competencies (knowledge, skills or professional attitudes) that your university education prepared you for success in your current position • Competencies you were NOT prepared for by your education post graduation • Where you learned the competencies needed for success

4. My Example: English MajorDirect a Teaching Center • Competencies prepared – writing, presentation skills, library/research skills, critical analysis of text, read for meaning, divergent thinking • Not prepared: Ethical inquiry, dialogue, interacting with individuals from different cultures and perspectives • Reading, on-the-job mistakes, finding a mentor

5. Part 2: At your tables, discuss: • How valuable were the competencies (KSA) you were taught to your career in the “real world”? • The competencies you didn’t learn – should you have learned them at the University? If so, where? • What we know about the forces converging on higher education in the US – should we think differently about the role of liberal arts?

6. ‘Rethinking Liberal Arts’ Assessment: Scottish Contexts and Ideas’Dr Vicky GunnDirectorLearning and Teaching Centre

7. 2004-10 Issues of the employability agenda In Scottish Higher Education

8. 2010-11 Revisiting Employability • Shifting emphasis from original approaches to impact of employability futures on how and why we teach: • Changing institutional missions & increasing sector differentiation: • Rural regeneration • Civic engagement & local economies (knowledge & financial) • Global involvement • 2. Work-related/ -based learning = teaching reformations in ‘non- • vocational’ areas • 3. Employability initiatives at a distance: • Technological solutions (problems?) • Placements at an international distance? • Domestic placements for international students and the Borders Agency

9. Conceptualising- what does assessment actually demonstrate? Research-Teaching Links Reflection on opportunities in and outside the curriculum

10. Increasing institutional differentiation in the sector may mean: • collaborative (rather than competitive) relationships between institutions in a devolved higher education sector become critical to in-country approaches to local knowledge economies and economic regeneration. • Paradoxically this needs to occur at the same time as certain institutions shift even more in focus away from the national context to global ones.

11. Leverage points in Scottish Universities 2004-12: Brokering possible partnerships Reputation management Academic standards Campus climate

12. Anticipating & managing recognisedchallenges (Emerged over the last decade)

13. Changing academic researcher landscape: Using our strengths?

14. Or focus on researcher orientations? Discipline orientation Teaching & knowledge transfer Problem-solving orientation Entrepre-neurial orientation Adapted from Hakala & Ylijoki, 2001

15. Drawing on our own experience?

16. Core curricular activities: Research-teaching linkages focused here currently

17. What does all this mean for how we assess in the Liberal Arts?

18. Thoughts? Comments?