Fall 2016 Assessment Workshop with Richard J. Light, Carl H. Pforzheimer Professor of Education at Harvard University
How Assessment Can Enhance the University Experience Both for Students and for Faculty:
Eight Concrete Examples, Plus a New Exercise
Friday, October 28, 2016
About the Workshop
Something slightly unusual is happening at Harvard. Faculty members are increasingly coming to view “assessment” not as an onerous or time-wasting task. Rather, they view themselves as setting the assessment Agenda. Plus they view the findings they get from students, both undergraduates and graduate and professional school students, as helpful for enhancing their own work.
In this workshop, Professor Richard Light will present a host of innovative approaches he and his colleagues use to perform assessment across the university. He will address what has changed on campus, what has improved, and how students’ experiences – from undergraduate to graduate and professional – have gotten better from assessing their learning in and out of the classroom.
For the second half of the workshop, Light will share a new program for first-year students called “Reflecting On Your Life,” which is appropriate for students of all ages and stages and was recently spotlighted in The New York Times. Attendees will take part in a hands-on exercise of the program, seeing how it works and how it may be adapted for use at BU.
About Richard J. Light
Richard Light is the Carl H. Pforzheimer Professor of Education. His Ph.D. is from Harvard in Statistics. Light has been asked by four Harvard presidents over the past twenty years to explore ways to improve the undergraduate experience both at Harvard and also for a diverse group of other, quite different colleges. To accomplish this he created the Harvard Assessment Seminars, a consortium of leaders from 25 colleges and universities, with the common goal to carry out research on enhancing college effectiveness. One of Richard Light’s special interests is to work on strengthening the connections between high schools and success for students as they start colleges of all kinds.
Light is author of Making the Most of College: Students Speak Their Minds (2001). This book won The Stone Award for best book on education and society. It has become one of the three best selling books in the 98-year history of the Harvard University Press. He is coauthor of Summing Up: The Science of Reviewing Research with David Pillemer, 1984); and he is co-author of By Design: Planning Research on Higher Education (with Judith Singer and John Willett, 1990), both published by Harvard Univ. Press. He has been Chairman of the Panel on Youth for the National Academy of Sciences, elected President of the American Evaluation Association, and has served as a member of the National Boards of the U. S. Government Accountability Office and the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education. Light is an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of The National Academy of Education. Light has won the Paul Lazarsfeld Award for distinguished contributions to science, and has been named by Vanderbilt University’s Chancellor’s Lecture Series as one of America’s great teachers.
