One theme that recurred throughout the year in which we planned the SENCER initiative was the recommendation that we make significant investments in helping our potential campus collaborators improve, via assessment, the effectiveness of the new learning programs in which they were to become engaged.

Science educators and academic leaders reported being largely unhappy with the results they were achieving using traditional methods and courses, especially those that could be said to "miniaturize" the content of "real" courses, such as those designed for potential majors. Moreover, it came as a serious disappointment to these educators that so few students-regardless of their levels of preparation and readiness-were inclined to elect to study science and mathematics beyond the basic requirements to do so.

Within the current systems of general education that embrace specific distribution requirements, many science faculty reported feeling that they had "only one chance" to interest students in problems and possibilities for intellectual engagement that they themselves had found, and continued to find, profoundly interesting and deeply important. One professor described the challenge in terms of "conveying my love for science" to students who seemed quite content to deny themselves the possibilities and pleasures of such an attachment.

An overwhelming majority of the more than 800 educators we surveyed and interviewed were attracted to the SENCER approach as a promising strategy to increase student interest and performance in science courses. This was certainly gratifying to us as planners, but for our respondents it represented anything but a naïve attraction to a new idea. Rather, their interest was accompanied by a demand to find out of this approach would really work. Above all, the educators with whom we consulted asked for help in improving course planning and the evaluation and assessment of student learning. This element is what attracted them to a national program.

The educators recognized that, given the deliberative and governance arrangements of academic departments and institutional committees responsible for curricular integrity and planning, the burden to show that a proposed reform is on the whole likely to improve learning falls on those proposing the reform. Thus, our potential collaborators expressed a serious need for evidence both to satisfy themselves that significant learning was taking place in SENCER courses and to persuade others as well.

Many would-be innovators rightly point out that evaluation and assessment is differentially mandated and stochastically applied. Indeed, a revised version Pope's dictum-"Whatever is, is right (and whatever isn't needs to be proven before it is implemented)"-captures the prevailing standard in some settings. The educators with whom we consulted, however, were not content to simply seek a scoundrel's refuge in these apparent inconsistencies and inequities, though they did offer convincing evidence that traditional evaluation schemes tended to be unsympathetic to progressive pedagogies (give particular examples: being well organized…."organizing" the learning oneself…). Instead, they insisted that we help find ways to come to know if the approaches they were willing to try and the SENCER national office was supporting genuinely resulted in improved learning.

Thus, to our potential collaborators in SENCER, the value of participating in a "national dissemination" program would be greatly enhanced and made significantly more attractive if the program also provided a set of strategies for improving course development, evaluating course and program effectiveness, assessing student performance, and demonstrating credible results.

To guide SENCER's work in this critical area of assessment and evaluation, we have been fortunate to engage the services of Dr. Elaine Seymour of the University of Colorado at Boulder. Seymour is a distinguished scholar and experienced evaluator. She has provided leadership and evaluation and assessment consultation on a variety of efforts designed to improve the effectiveness of science learning. These range from programs to improve the teaching of chemistry, to efforts to improve the numbers of women studying and majoring in the sciences, to assessing the benefits of programs designed to enhance undergraduate research activities. Of particular interest to the SENCER organizers was Seymour's innovation represented by the Student Assessment of Learning Gains (SALG) instrument, an on-line system that asks students to think about (assess) their learning and to help instructors improve that learning by identifying the course elements that most contributed to their understanding of the course's material.

In 2001, the National Science Foundation provided AAC&U with resources to develop and implement SENCER fully. To meet the needs identified in our planning phase, and with Dr. Seymour's help, the SENCER national office initially decided to support two new approaches, both connected top the critical issue of assessment:

1. Institutions participating in the SENCER Summer Institutes would agree to participate in a common assessment and evaluation program designed to develop, over a long term, both formative and summative assessment and evaluation data. A significant element of this activity would involve the use of a SENCER course planning template developed by Dr. Seymour. The template helps course developers think through the planning process and link learning goals to course elements so as to render connections transparent. In a word, the template helps developers provide answers to the common student inquiry: "why do I need to know X?"

2. SENCER would sponsor the customization of the SALG for use by students and faculty to assess outcomes in SENCER-inspired courses. The customization would involve two significant changes: first, the SALG would be customized for "group" use (that is, it would cover SENCER aims for SENCER courses) and second, it would be revised to permit pre- and post- course assessment. (The original version of the SALG is only administered once during a student's particular course participation.) While faculty and students are free to use the "original" SALG, participating SENCER institutions would agree to use the SENCER SALG.

With the development of SENCER as a national dissemination program (now involving more than 100 institutions), it became increasingly apparent that we needed to enhance our assessment and evaluation activities to meet participant needs and to support the development and refinement of assessment instruments and systems. This, in turn, led us to ask Dr. Seymour to propose a comprehensive assessment and evaluation program tailored to the needs of our participants and designed to help us insure that the investments being made in SENCER by the NSF were paying dividends. With this expanded assessment and evaluation plan, we requested supplemental and received funding from the National Science Foundation to implement a multi-part assessment and evaluation plan through a sub-contract from SENCER to The Center to Advance Research in the Social Sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Dr. Elaine Seymour is the principal investigator.