Meaningful Course Revision : Enhancing Academic Engagement Using Student Learning Data

Faculty are often motivated to change the activities and design of their courses for reasons not based on data. In Meaningful Course Revision, the author seeks instead to illustrate how the appropriate use of multiple, direct measures of student-learning outcomes can lead to enhanced course development and revision. While providing an outline of methods for creating significant learning experiences, the book also includes practical suggestions for shaping the design of a course to meet student needs.

Meaningful Course Revision urges a rethinking of teaching and learning. By making student advancement its focal point, it offers guidance through

• Data-based decision making
• Designing course-based assessment activities
• Using data to enhance innovation in course redesign
• Rethinking teaching and learning
• Embedding assessment activities in meaningful ways
• Planning the course
• Closing the feedback loop
• Moving from course-level decision making to departmental curriculum planning
• Creating a culture of student-learning outcomes assessment

Written for faculty seeking advice on how to keep their teaching interesting and effective, Meaningful Course Revision is a practical guide for collecting information about how well students are reaching course goals, learning what impact course changes are having on student learning, and putting courses into a cycle of continual revision and improvement.

Catherine Wehlburg is currently the executive director of the Office for Assessment and Quality Enhancement at Texas Christian University. Prior to this, she worked as the director of the William H. Koehler Center for teaching Excellence, also at Texas Christian University.
She earned a Ph.D. in educational psychology from the University of Florida in 1992 and took a faculty position at Stephens College in 1991 where she taught in the psychology department and began to explore the interplay between faculty development and assessment at the university level.
Dr. Wehlburg has edited or coedited four volumes of To Improve the Academy (Anker, 2001-2004) and has published several articles and book chapters on assessment and faculty development. In 1998 she worked as a senior associate at the American Association for Higher Education in the Assessment Forum while on sabbatical. In addition, she has been a consultant-evaluator for the Higher learning Commission and for the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.