Learning Improvement Community  

• Born out of the inaugural Learning Improvement Summit in 2017, that was started as a partnership between The Center for Assessment & Research Studies (JMU) and Charlie Blaich and Kathy Wise from the Center of Inquiry (Wabash College).  
   
• A collaborative project led by a group of attendees from the Learning Improvement Summit(s) that strives to collect and share learning improvement stories.  

Assessment Institute & IUPUI 

• JMU faculty and students have contributed to and participated in the annual Assessment Institute hosted by Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). In recent years, Keston Fulcher and CARS have worked with Assessment Institute President, Dr. Stephen Hundley, on many collaborative pursuits.  
   
  • Creating a learning improvement track at the annual Assessment Institute 
  • Delivering keynote addresses, and serving on panels at the Institute 
  • Helping to share the story of Dr. Hundley's vision for the future of the Assessment Institute through an interview project.  
  • Plans to collaborate on an international Assessment Institute, with CARS as a co-host (originally scheduled for Berlin in June 2020, but postponed due to COVID-19) 
   
• IUPUI faculty visit JMU for professional development  
   
  • In 2018, IUPUI's Director of Academic Quality and Undergraduate Education, Shawn Boyne, held a residency at JMU as an American Council of Education (ACE) Fellow; where she spent the semester learning about assessment. Shawn attended some of our summer assessment offerings, including our APT rater training workshop where she learned about JMU's assessment reporting process.  
  • In the summer of 2019, Shawn came back to JMU and brought a team of faculty from IUPUI to participate in a week-long workshop called "Learning Improvement in Action: Integrating Ethical Reasoning & Program-Level Learning Improvement." This workshop, attended by groups from 5 different institutions, aimed to help teach how to develop a program-level learning improvement plan through the example of an ethical reasoning intervention (modeled after JMU's Ethical Reasoning in Action - Eight Key Questions program.)    

NILOA

• CARS faculty and students have had their work published many times over the years in NILOA's Occasional Papers series.  
   
• Partnerships with NILOA on Webinars

Virginia Assessment Group (VAG) 

• As our regional assessment working group, JMU has an ongoing relationship with VAG. CARS faculty and students participate regularly in the annual meeting and conference held in cities throughout Virginia; often sending 10+ more presenters.  
   
• Both Keston Fulcher & Robin Anderson (alumni of the A&M  Ph.D. Program, and Graduate Psychology faculty) have served as past presidents of the Virginia Assessment Group. (Robin is the founder of the Research & Practice in Assessment newsletter, which has become their professional journal) 
   
• Jeanne Horst has served as a board member for the last 6-7 years; and CARS regularly sponsors the annual conference.  
   
• In 2019, the Professional Development team within CARS partnered with VAG, and 4-Virginia to co-host an Assessment Drive-In virtual day-long conference pertaining to assessment in higher education. The event included groups participating through a telepresence platform from six different locations across the Commonwealth: George Mason University, James Madison University, Old Dominion University, University of Virginia, Virginia Commonwealth University (Cisco Headquarters), and Virginia Tech.  

The Madison Center & CARS: Measuring Students' Civic Engagement at JMU   

The Madison Collaborative: Campus-wide ethical reasoning initiatives  

General Education: University-wide faculty inclusion and innovation  

First-Year Orientation: Connecting the dots through implementation fidelity improvement 

• Associations of American Colleges & Universities (AAC&U) 
• Association for the Assessment of Learning in Higher Education (AALHE) 
• Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning  
• Center of Inquiry at Wabash College 
• Council for the Advancement of Standards in Higher Education (CAS) 
• Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence & Educational Innovation at Carnegie Mellon University 
• Empirical Educators Project 
• Research & Practice in Assessment (RPA) Journal 
• Southern Association of Schools and Colleges Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC) 
• University of Hawai'i at Mānoa