Indicators of “Good Practice” in Undergraduate Education: A Handbook for Development and Implementation
| Title: | Indicators of “Good Practice” in Undergraduate Education: A Handbook for Development and Implementation |
| Author: | Ewell, Peter T. Jones, Dennis P. |
| Date: | 1996 |
| Catalog #: | 2BA392 |
| Price: | $ 16.95 |
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| Description: |
The purpose of this Handbook is to provide colleges and universities with initial guidance in establishing an appropriate system of indicators of the effectiveness of undergraduate instructional delivery, and to build on this foundation by cataloguing a range of exemplary indicators of “good practice” that have proven useful across many collegiate settings. Chapter 1 provides a brief overview of the rising demand for performance indicators at all levels of higher education, and discusses the underlying management philosophy within which any set of institution-level indicators of academic practice ought to be developed. In the light of campus experience with assessment, the chapter also makes the specific case for developing indicators of undergraduate “good practice” in preference to more traditional resource-based and descriptive indicators of instructional delivery and as a supplement to information about effectiveness. Chapter 2 discusses explicitly the properties of a good indicator, and emphasizes the ways such measures can be used and abused. Chapter 3 provides a taxonomy of “good practice” domains according to which useful indicators can in fact be developed, based on factors known through the research literature to be associated with collegiate achievement. Chapter 4 discusses various data sources that institutions can use to construct indicators of the kinds described in the Handbook, and provides suggestions about how to present such information and organize and archive the resulting database. With these chapters as context, the core of the Handbook consists of a catalog of 65 suggested good practice indicators. Organized in terms of the taxonomy suggested in Chapter 2, institutions are encouraged to adopt or adapt these sample measures in developing their own approaches. Each entry in the catalog describes the proposed measure by providing a brief definition, an explanation of its potential use and purpose, and the relevant data-collection and/or calculational procedures required to produce it. The primary intent of the catalog is to stimulate good thinking at the institutional level, and to provide a place for each institution to start in developing its own indicators approaches. |