Current and Recent Projects

The BEVI: How Serious Assessment Meets a World of Need

Over the years, the BEVI has been used in a wide range of contexts and settings, both in the United States and around the world.  Through such activities, we retain fidelity to our core mission, vision, and values through an ongoing commitment to the non-profit world as well as students, educators, researchers, practitioners, and leaders who wish to “make sense of beliefs and values” via state-of-the-art assessment, including but not limited to the BEVI.  By devoting our time, resources, and expertise to such collaborations, we seek to illuminate how serious assessment – depth-based, psychometrically rigorous, ecologically valid– can help meet a world of need.

Forum BEVI Project

For instance, the Forum BEVI Project, a six-year collaboration with two non-profit organizations – the Forum on Education Abroad and International Beliefs and Values Institute – is a prime example of such work, helping us understand how, why, and under what circumstances human learning, growth, and development do – and do not – occur.  The implications and applications of the Forum BEVI Project resulted in “over 20 publications (e.g., articles, chapters, dissertations), 50 presentations (e.g., symposia, papers, posters), and hundreds of separate analyses” (Wandschneider et al., 2015, p. 160).

Colonial Academic Alliance

Another “in-kind” (i.e., donated) contribution of the BEVI is integral to a grant proposal called Engaging Difference: A Deep Dive into the Assessment of Transformative Learning.  This proposal was reviewed and approved by the Colonial Academic Alliance as a partnership between Elon University and James Madison University, and is designed to examine the real world impact of international education on students.

Academic and Community Collaboration

Over the past two decades, many similar in-kind activities have occurred with students as well as educators, and scholars at the undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral level (e.g., capstone projects,  learning communities, presentations, dissertations).  Additional collaborations have occurred with non-profit and community-based leaders, entities, and individuals across a range of areas (e.g., board of directors of a women’s organization; inmates in a department of corrections; community mental health clients).

COIL BEVI Project

The BEVI has been tapped for the COIL BEVI Project, a grant-based initiative between the Japanese and U.S. governments, which is coordinated by the American Council on Education (ACE) and Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT).

Among other curriculum and program development goals, this project seeks to evaluate whether and to what degree COIL – Collaborative Online International Learning – helps students who may otherwise not be able to afford or manage study abroad but can still benefit from engaging with their peers and faculty in other countries through low cost, accessible, and web-based technologies. See the news release for this project for more information.

Engaged, High Impact, and Transformative Learning

Through activities like these, we seek to facilitate “engaged learning,” “high impact learning,” and “transformative learning,” though scholarly discourse, real world application, and big picture initiatives like the Cultivating the Globally Sustainable Self Summit Series.  This multi-year, multi-institution, multi-country endeavor includes over 20 separate research-to-practice projects, a number of which include the BEVI and other measures and will be featured in a forthcoming book on the Summit Series with Oxford University Press .