The conference is designed to address emerging issues in assessment and retention as well as to showcase effective practice, thereby serving a wide range of institutional audiences, from those that are just initiating assessment to those that are integrating and modifying structures and practice. It thus will address the needs of practitioners and institutional policy-makers and will raise new and challenging issues in the related areas of assessment and retention. Please see the call for proposals questions below before you submit a proposal.

Call for Proposals

Assessment as a Strategy to Improve Learning. This topical area is open to discussions of the ways in which students' experiences both inside and outside the classroom produce learning.

• In what ways can Academic Affairs and Students Affairs cooperate to assure the achievement of learning outcomes?
• How can institutions assure shared responsibility for improving student learning?
• How can institutions emphasize improvement of learning over reporting of data in both internal and external communications?
• How can institutions assure that their institutional and general education learning outcomes are understood by all stakeholders, assessed at relevant points in a student's career, and made part of the institution's conversation about learning?

Assessment as a Strategy to Improve Persistence. Because of the aggregated data-reporting focus of much assessment activity, the usefulness of assessment information in helping individual students or groups of students has been less considered in assessment practice than it ought to be. Reconsidering this aspect of assessment can bring us to consider the ways in which institutions can use assessment information about both learners and learning to improve persistence.

• How can assessment information be used to deal with achievement gaps between different groups of students?
• How can assessment information be used in advising and in other institutional dealings with students?
• How can assessment information be used to improve retention and persistence?
• How can assessment information be used to inform institutional programming and decision-making?

Assessment as a Tool to Improve Transparency. As calls for accountability become louder and more shrill, institutions need to plan ways in which they can communicate their success in producing student success to their stakeholders. Reconsidering the information higher education collects-and the strategies used to collect it-can produce public information tailored to mission and more meaningful to internal and external stakeholders.

• How can institutions affect external expectations so that they focus on student learning rather than test scores?
• What kinds of information do external stakeholders like parents and legislators expect?
• How do we provide external stakeholders with information that is useful to them and useful for continuous improvement of learning?

Assessment Management and Leadership. It has become clear that developing and managing assessment practice on any campus-large or small, private or public-is a complex undertaking that requires adaptability and institutional cooperation. Simply building a system that conducts assessments, builds databases, and "closes the loop" is not sufficient to guarantee commitment of staff, engagement of students, and transparency for stakeholders.

• What strategies for stimulating "buy-in" are most effective?
• How can assessment activities be effectively and efficiently structured and coordinated to assure improvement in learning?
• How can assessment activities be integrated in institutional planning and budgeting
• What are effective ways of communicating assessment results to stakeholders?

International Assessment & Retention Session Types:

Concurrent sessions, are 75 minute presentations by practitioners and researchers in assessment that address one of the themes of the conference. Different concurrent sessions will address assessment and retention topics at different levels for different audiences, from beginners through advanced practitioners, but the expectation is that the programs, practices, and ideas that are showcased will be mature, and that the data and conclusions presented will be the result of several years of successful activity.

Poster sessions, scheduled during one time block at the conference, are designed to showcase interesting new approaches and practices that do not yet have the maturity of programs presented in concurrent sessions.

Roundtable discussions, are one hour conversations, during which proponents lead discussions on current topics, issues, and strategies in assessment and retention. No formal presentations are expected or desired in roundtable discussions; instead, proponents should have a clear plan for facilitating a highly interactive discussion.

Pre-Conference Workshops, two- or three-hour, highly interactive, application-oriented sessions designed to provide participants with tools and approaches for implementing or improving assessment and retention efforts on their home campuses. Each workshop will be aimed at a specific level of implementation, from initial planning or implementation through the uses of data for institutional change through public reporting, so that participants can enroll in sessions appropriate to their institution's level of development.