Introduction:
Going Public: How Collaborative Learning and Learning
Communities Invite New Assessment Approaches

Jean MacGregor

         Collaborative learning, learning community curricular structures, and assessment of student learning are reform efforts that are each beginning to have important effects on college classrooms and curricula. Springing from different roots, these initiatives have expanded in the past decade to include multiple approaches used in diverse educational settings. Each of these reforms asks faculty members and students to consider teaching, learning and curriculum issues in new frameworks. This essay explores assessment's role in collaborative learning settings, and its challenges as well.

Collaborative Learning and Learning Communities

         The term collaborative learning encompasses a growing collection of approaches that engage students, or students and teachers together, in joint intellectual effort. Small group learning, book seminars, team learning, peer instruction, writing groups, case discussions, simulations, and problem-based learning are just some of the strands in an expanding web of collaborative learning approaches. Teachers committed to collaborative learning believe that learning improves when students construct knowledge for themselves, in conversation with and in concert with others. When students work with students to clarify understandings, generate meaning, solve problems, or create something new, they can strengthen their understanding of course material. But this is not all. Through learning collaboratively, students can also learn the art and skill of building relationships with others. They can recognize the value as well as the challenges of mutual inquiry and problem-solving. Moreover, they can come to new understandings of themselves as responsible creators of their own knowledge and meanings-an essential skill for life-long learning.

         Collaborative learning can occur not only at the classroom level, but at the curriculum level as well, through Learning Communities. Learning communities are curriculum restructuring initiatives that link or cluster courses around a common theme and enroll a common group of students. Although learning community structures are quite variable, they have two common intentions. First, they aim to bring coherence to students' otherwise fragmented, unrelated course-taking patterns. They build interdisciplinary connections between subject matter. Or, they situate skills such as writing, speaking, or quantitative reasoning in the context of content. Second, learning communities aim to build both academic and social community for students by enrolling cohorts of students in a larger block of course work. Learning community approaches have sprung up rapidly in the past decade in Washington state: about 30 colleges in Washington have initiated some type of learning community program, and over 100 colleges elsewhere in the nation have launched similar efforts.

         Learning communities take many forms. Many campuses offer thematic course clusters as a general education option (e.g., "Time and Rhythm," a cluster of courses in the history of jazz, United States history, and English composition; or "Freedom and Seeing," a cluster connecting courses in writing, art and philosophy). At larger universities, multidisciplinary clusters linked to a freshman seminar have appeared as an approach to enhancing the first-term experience for beginning students. Intradisciplinary linked courses or clusters have been established to introduce junior and transfer students to study in the major. Or, to enhance study in the minor, two courses can be linked, such as classes in ethics and women's fiction in a women's studies program.

         At community colleges, learning community programs appear in college transfer curricula and in vocational, English-as-a-Second Language, and developmental programs as well. Many of these learning communities have appeared as team-taught coordinated studies programs with interdisciplinary themes, e.g., "The Televised Mind" (with course work in English composition, sociology, and popular culture), "Pacific Northwest History, Culture and Landscape" (history, anthropology, and geography), or "The American Character" (history, literature, and film studies). What is common to all these programs is the effort by the faculty teams to build connections, or occasionally, oppositions, among the courses they are teaching, and to engage students in a holistic learning experience.

         Learning communities truly do "re-form" the curriculum, by putting individually- taught courses into coordinated, team-planned or team-taught larger wholes. This new way of structuring undergraduate course work brims with opportunities for creating multiple intellectual and social connections among disciplines, faculty, and students. Not only that, learning communities provide a natural structure both for collaborative teaching and collaborative learning. These curriculum innovations live alongside the college's regular course offerings, and, generally, are optional for students. However, several Washington community colleges have meshed learning communities with general education reform efforts, requiring students to take a quarter or more in a learning community for the associate degree.

         Both approaches to collaboration-collaborative learning that is fostered in free-standing classes and that which is fostered in learning community structures-make the teaching and learning process interactive and dynamic, but demanding as well. Students encounter new expectations having to do with preparing for class, participating in groups or teams, giving critical responses to other students' work and receiving it about their own, and moving from a competitive stance with peers to a cooperative one-expectations that depart from the norms of many college classes. As teachers, we too are challenged, to develop engaging and meaningful collaborative learning tasks, and to develop a sense of community in our classes. For most of us, designing collaborative tasks is much more exacting and intricate than assembling lectures. In team-taught learning communities, there is the additional demand of planning a curriculum with colleagues. However, in most collaborative learning settings, the stimulating environment and increased involvement more than justify the investment of time and energy.

Assessment

         Just as collaborative learning and learning communities have emerged in undergraduate education, so has another reform effort: assessment. In the early 1980's, public concerns about the rising costs of education and the quality and effectiveness of undergraduate teaching led to a drive for accountability on our campuses. Assessment, often associated with standardizing testing approaches, was initially touted as a tool for accountability, and the early assessment agenda consisted largely of reporting summative information about students' academic skills and rates of graduation. Imposed from without, and often vague in its real intentions, the initial effect of assessment was to put much of the higher education community on the defensive. Within a few years, though, faculty members and administrators had begun to shape the assessment agenda more to their own purposes. They have begun to view assessment less in terms of an external accountability exercise and more as a long-term internal improvement effort: an opportunity to improve learning and teaching by clarifying outcomes for student learning, asking questions, gathering information to answer questions, and then taking action.

         As assessment has continued to evolve on campuses in Washington and around the nation, it has become two coexistent and related agendas: those of both proving and improving: proving in the sense of documenting and describing the results of programs or curricula to institutional or external audiences, and improving in the sense of gathering data for more internal purposes of identifying needs or gaps, solving problems, or developing and strengthening programs. Ideally, assessment efforts act like camera lenses, to focus and clarify our understanding of both what we are doing as teachers and what students are doing as learners. As the "Classroom Assessment" approach of Pat Cross and Tom Angelo has revealed, assessment need not be ambitious or large-scale research endeavors conducted by professional educational researchers. As teachers, we can carry out assessment in small ways, day-to-day, in each of our classrooms, as we take the pulse of student learning and shape our teaching accordingly.

Assessment's Opportunities and Challenges in Collaborative Learning Settings

         Collaborative learning contexts are de facto assessment gold mines. In classrooms where faculty members lecture and engage only a few students in discussion, the learning process is mostly a private affair for students. Teachers see evidence of student understanding primarily on occasional quizzes, tests, and papers. Collaborative learning settings differ dramatically because from the beginning of the course, learning is public. Students are engaged in making sense of material and generating meaning-out loud-in full view of teachers and peers. Collaborative learning activities provide a continuous stream of evidence about student learning for all to see. Students working with others can gauge the sense they and their peers are making of the course material, and how they are relating it to previous learning and life experiences. Teachers see immediately what students do and don't yet understand, and where the learning seems to surge forward and where it stalls. Every class, then, naturally offers a wealth of assessment data, which invite mid-course corrections to improve student learning.

         On the other hand, the public and collaborative nature of the learning makes the evaluation and grading of students more complex. Because student learning is so public in these settings, and because informal rehearsal and performance are such continuous and intertwined processes, student evaluation presents challenges. Do we evaluate students' informal day-to-day work, and if so, how? Do we evaluate concept mastery? Oral communication? Qualities of team work and leadership? If the day-to-day learning is highly collaborative and community-building, will individual exams or other forms of student assessment seem so competitive as to undo the cooperative spirit of the class? What about the academically strong student who refuses to help others? Or the academically weak student who is a terrific team player? These are just a few of the questions that confront us.

         With a plethora of new things going on in collaborative learning settings, the very act of defining appropriate demonstrations of student learning forces us to focus. Frequently, our intended outcomes for students go beyond their mastery of course material. Rather, we hope these learning experiences will sharpen critical thinking, increase empathy for diverging viewpoints, result in perspective-taking, foster a sense of citizenship, and develop varied communication skills. For teachers to assess students, many traditional testing approaches are inadequate for measuring the complexity and depth of learning that occurs in most of these settings. For students to assess these courses or programs, the traditional end-of-course evaluation form is also inadequate for evaluating the quality, and the impact, of collaborative learning environments. We need to create new tools for this work. What dimension of our teaching, or the students' learning, or the whole course or learning community program are we assessing? As assessors we need to clarify what outcomes are most crucial for us and for our students to assess, and to follow through with assessment activities in those areas.

         The pressure to prove innovations also challenges us. While collaborative learning approaches and learning community curricula are spreading, they still represent departures from more conventional approaches. As innovators, we are expected to prove ourselves. Our colleagues want us to demonstrate that students have learned as well (or as much) as in conventional classrooms. Other colleagues need convincing that what we are doing constitutes legitimate teaching. This is no trivial task: a member of our group working on this handbook tells how his dean arrived to observe one of his classes in which small groups were working through carefully designed discussion problems. Seeing the groups in the room, the dean turned to leave, saying, "Oh, you're doing groups. I'll come back another time when you're teaching."

         To educate that dean, and other uninformed or skeptical colleagues, we need to harvest and make more public the richness of the student learning and engagement that we are observing in our classrooms. We need to go public as well with the difficulties of teaching in collaborative learning settings, for it is only through sharing and working through these problems that our efforts will become stronger and more sophisticated.

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