Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP)

Through LEAP, hundreds of campuses are making far-reaching educational changes to help all their students—whatever their chosen field of study—acquire the broad knowledge, higher order capacities, and real world experience they need to thrive both in the economy and in a globally engaged democracy.
LEAP promotes:
•Essential Learning Outcomes—as a guiding vision and national benchmarks for college learning and liberal education in the 21st century
•Principles of Excellence—offering both challenging standards and flexible guidance for an era of educational reform and renewal.
•High-Impact Educational Practices—ways of engaging and challenging students—such as first year programs; intensive writing, collaborative assignments, undergraduate research, internships, and major projects that help students achieve essential learning outcomes
•Authentic Assessments—using students’ own work and faculty-validated rubrics, probing whether individual students have developed essential capacities, and can apply their learning to complex problems and real-world challenges.
•Students’ Signature Work—challenging higher education to prepare all students to complete a substantial cross-disciplinary project in a topic significant to the student and society, as part of the expected pathway to a degree. The signature project can take one of many forms (e.g. capstone, internship, field work, research, community-based research).

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