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Being tapped to serve as director of the Forum on Assessment, which is part of the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE) is an honor. It's also an honor to be named four-year chairman of a $1.5 million project for the Pew Charitable Trust. Both of them require a stay in Washington, D.C., which is fortunate for Barbara Cambridge, because she won't have to try to be in two places at the same time.
Cambridge, associate dean of the faculties for undergraduate education at IUPUI, has the double honor of being named to both leadership roles in those prestigious organizations. She will spend two years in Washington as director of the Forum on Assessment and at the same time lead the project for the Pew Charitable Trust. The latter won't take her far afield from her career in higher education; it focuses on the integrity of the baccalaureate degree. Cambridge will finish the final two years of the Pew project back at IUPUI.
As for the AAHE, "it's one of the top two professional organizations in the country in terms of higher education issues," Cambridge said. "The Pew project will help shape 21st century thinking on higher education's mission. We will select six colleges or universities from across the U.S. to study how students progress toward baccalaureate degrees and how higher education can find ways to improve that progress."
Even for a four-year project, "it's a big agenda," Cambridge said. "But it's vital that we do so."
Cambridge was chosen by the AAHE and the Pew Trust because they needed someone who had been involved in assessment issues at the campus level, "someone with hands-on experience," she explained. "I've worked in assessment on the national scene, from the practical as well as the theoretical side of assessing student learning."
The practical side is crucial due to the public's growing demand for accountability. As budgets tighten, she said, there is growing public and governmental insistence that higher education produce well-educated students. "Proving" that students are learning requires colleges and universities to find ways that adequately measure student performance in the classroom.
It also signals the shift from greater emphasis on research and teaching, as institutions of higher learning focus on how students learn and how to prepare them for a lifetime of applying what they've learned at college.
"Students have become the central mission," Cambridge said. "Not that teaching and research aren't vitally important, but they must support student learning."