Pre-Workshop Briefing

Assignments that Improve Arguments: CLA in the Classroom

CALL and Response Workshop

Friday, October 31 - Saturday, November 1, 2008

This workshop is part of a new Teagle grant to Carleton, Macalester and St. Olaf Colleges supporting a project we’ve named “CALL and Response.” This new project builds on our earlier Teagle-funded CALL (“Collaborative Assessment for Liberal Learning”) initiative, which helped us gather direct evidence of our students’ learning in critical thinking, effective writing, quantitative reasoning, and global understanding. The purpose of our new CALL and Response consortium project is to use that evidence to make systematic improvements in our students’ ability to make effective arguments. The CALL and Response project blends assessment, scholarship of teaching and learning, and faculty development to accomplish this goal for improved student learning at all three of our institutions.

Our first CALL and Response workshop, “Assignments That Improve Arguments: CLA in the Classroom,” is designed to help instructors design course-specific assignments that require students to evaluate an array of evidence – qualitative and quantitative, relevant and irrelevant, reliable and questionable – and make a convincing argument that is appropriately supported by that evidence. Participants will also develop tools for classroom-level assessment of students’ work, to track improvements in their proficiencies systematically. The workshop will be led by Marc Chun and Esther Hong, researchers from the national Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) project, in which St. Olaf, Carleton, and Macalester are all participating. Marc and Esther will share the design principles and assessment strategies used in CLA performance tasks, which participants can then use as springboards for designing their own course-specific assignments and assessments (hence, “CLA in the Classroom”). Our hope is to link institutional-level evidence with classroom practice, to the benefit of each.

In order to make our time together as productive as possible, we ask participants to take a little time prior to the workshop to familiarize themselves with the Collegiate Learning Assessment instrument and its implications for teaching and learning. Below is a list of links to brief information which we ask you to review:

Overview of the CLA: http://www.cae.org/content/pro_collegiate.htm.

Sample CLA tasks: http://www.cae.org/content/pro_collegiate_sample_measures.htm

CLA FAQs (including task development, validity, reliability, and scoring criteria): http://www.cae.org/content/pdf/CLA_Technical_FAQs.pdf

We look forward to your participation in this workshop!