Inviting College Students to Reflect on their Collegiate Experiences Patricia M. King, University of Michigan The theme of this conference, “Learning Beyond Measure? Assessing the Liberal Arts,” is one of many indicators of the national interest in educational assessment and assessment of learning outcomes in general, and the assessment of liberal arts education in particular. People in many roles and at many kinds of institutions have a stake in the quality of the conversation about liberal arts outcomes, so it is incumbent upon us to take seriously the opportunities we have to participate in this national conversation, to examine the issues carefully and thoroughly, and most importantly, to act on them as though the success of our students and our institutions depended upon it—because they do! For the last four years, I have had the opportunity to participate in a number of conversations about liberal arts education and the assessment of liberal arts outcomes through my affiliation with the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College. Today, I am reporting some findings from research done under the auspices of the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education. This study is the source of the student quotes I use throughout this presentation. Through this project, we have asked college students to reflect on their collegiate experiences. Between the pilot cross-sectional and the current longitudinal study, about 5200 students from 19 campuses completed a battery of assessment instruments designed to measure liberal education outcomes, and an extensive survey of collegiate experiences. In addition, a subsample of 450 students completed a one-hour individual interview. This is really a remarkable project, and I am eager to tell you about it and explore its implications for education and assessment. (For a description of a major work on liberal arts education that informed the current study, see Pascarella, Wolniak, Seifert, Cruce, and Blaich, 2005). Talking to college students about their collegiate experiences can be a very rich source of information about how they understand the world of college: its purposes, how to succeed, what the process of learning is really all about, how they see college as preparing them for the future, and how it both lived up to their expectations and disappointed them. These conversations also provide vivid examples about how students take care of each other, rationalize cheating, feel like the only ones who don’t drink to excess, and rely on their parents to tell them what to do (such as which classes to take). These conversations provide “insiders’ views” (that is, students’ views) of their understanding of the formal programs in which they participate, of the services they find and may or may not use, and of the informal interactions with faculty, staff, and peers. Most important for our purposes, they also reveal students’ interpretations of the effects of these interactions on their learning and development. Although students seldom call it this explicitly, these interpretations provide their own assessments of their learning. Following are two examples of how students interpret their expectations and experiences. Example 1 Interviewer (I): What were your expectations coming into college?