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Student Samples for the ACE/FIPSE Pilot

The ACE/FIPSE project intended to sample student who had diverse international learning experiences, including: students who were taking internationally oriented general education courses, living in an international residence hall, engaging in intensive language studies, participating in diverse models of education abroad, working on international or regional studies certificates, majoring in international or regional studies, and/or participating in capstone international/intercultural courses. Each institution originally proposed the following specific student sample:

Dickinson College

• Two hundred students majoring in International Studies, International Business and Management, and in two new anticipated majors in the Policy Studies program: Law and Policy, and Policy Management. All students will create a portfolio. A sub-sample of 25 will also take the BEVI; the IDI also may be administered.

Kalamazoo College

• One hundred-thirty students who have participated in one of four education-abroad models: short-term, long-term, extended term, and study tours. All 130 will assemble ePortfolios; a sample of 25 will take the BEVI; the IDI also may be administered.
• Twenty senior International and Area Studies students who may have studied abroad (IDI and ePorfolio).

Kapi'olani Community College

• Between 45 and 70 general education students from the following courses: World Civilization, post-1500; World Regional Geography; World Religions; English Composition; as well as the foreign language courses (Filipino, French, Chinese, Hawaiian, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish). All students will take the BEVI; a sample of 45 who continue on in specified International, Asian, or Pacific Islands Studies courses over the subsequent three semesters will assemble ePortfolios.
• Sixty Freeman Scholar students who are studying Japanese, Chinese, or Korean intensively on campus followed by a term abroad in Japan, China, or Korea, respectively. This component will be funded by matching Freeman Foundation monies (BEVI and ePortfolio).

Michigan State University

• Between 200 and 500 incoming freshmen in the Academic Orientation or Fall Welcome programs. All will take the BEVI; a sample will also complete ePortfolios.
• Between 50 and 100 students, representative of freshmen and sophomore international certificate majors (Africa, Asia, Latin America, Canada, Center for European and Russian Studies), majors or concentrations with an international focus (e.g., an International Relations concentration or an Interdisciplinary Studies major administered by the College of Social Science), or majors with expressed international learning outcomes (e.g., business or engineering) (BEVI and ePortfolio).

Palo Alto College

• From 100 to 150 students enrolled in one of the 50 International Studies certificate courses (BEVI).
• From 100 to 150 students enrolled in HUMA1302: World Cultures and Global Issues, the International Studies certificate gateway course (BEVI and ePortfolio).

Changes in the Project and Student Sample

Through the course of the three-year ACE/FIPSE project, the steering committee successfully addressed several challenges in developing and implementing a complex, multi-institutional project involving multiple assessment instruments. Achieving agreement at each stage of the project was important for purposes of working across institutions. At the outset, the steering committee agreed upon the tools to be used in the project, including a common set of learning outcomes, the rubrics used to assess the outcomes in the ePortfolios, a process for training raters, and an inventory of student attitudes and experiences (the Beliefs, Events, and Values Inventory—BEVI).

The steering committee, however, saw the need to agree to institutional variations in implementing the assessment approach at their institutions. As the project evolved, the goal of having inter-rater reliability across institutions was set aside in order to free them to customize the assessment process according to their institutional culture and capacity. Also, as the project evolved it became clear that the original goal of having a complex integrated data collection system—one that brought together data from the BEVI survey instrument and the ePortfolio into one data pool—was operationally quite complex, requiring a great deal of time to implement. The relative costs and benefits of the BEVI were questioned. ACE decided to substitute for the BEVI a simplified questionnaire that asked only for student demographics and experience with international learning, and set aside the goal of one integrated data set. The simplified questionnaire evolved to become the SPIF as presented in this tool-kit. ACE developed and managed the data collection process for the SPIF.

In the end, all of the institutions originally involved in the project were not able to achieve their original goals of having multiple cohorts of students involved. We believe this is largely due to the challenge of engaging students to voluntarily participate in this project. The project has, however, achieved its primary objective—that of illustrating the most important challenges and lessons that can be drawn from a complex multi-institutional assessment approach.

A summary table of the final samples from the pilot sites is available.

Please direct questions about this page to:
jill_wisniewski@ace.nche.edu | Staff Contacts
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This page last updated on: 09/03/2008