SUBMITTING AN ESSAY TO LIBERALARTSONLINE

Please read the author’s guidelines below before submitting an essay. If you have already reviewed the guidelines, click here to submit a piece for consideration.

Guidelines for Authors (revised September 2007)

LiberalArtsOnline is an occasional electronic publication of the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College about assessment in liberal arts education. We are currently looking for essays on how faculty, staff, and administrators use evidence to strengthen liberal arts education.

Possible topics:

• Your experiences with improving a program or structure at your liberal arts institution. What precipitated the program change, how was the change made, and what were the effects on students?
• Lessons learned from working with a committee on, for example, curriculum development or reform in liberal arts education.
• A piece about how gathering data for strategic planning led to changing a liberal arts program.
• Your experience with using findings from research in the scholarship of teaching and learning to advocate or enact institutional change on your campus.
• An essay about how a departmental assessment at your liberal arts institution connected to helping students at the school realize a liberal arts outcome.
•  A case study about using an assessment instrument on your campus. What were the implications of the findings for faculty, students, staff, and administrators?
• Suggestions for effectively using information gathered from assessment instruments like the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) or the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA).
• Methods for gathering evidence about the impact of liberal arts education and how such evidence can be used to benefit a college community.
• Your experience with using research findings in higher education to improve your teaching practices.
• Research about the impact of particular academic or cocurricular programs, practices, or structures at your institution and the implications for liberal arts education.
  
  Note: Research findings should be written for the use of a broad audience.

Essays submitted to LiberalArtsOnline should be approximately 1,000–2,000 words long. Our audience mainly consists of faculty, staff, and administrators at liberal arts institutions. They represent diverse fields and backgrounds, so we encourage authors to write with a clear, jargon-free style. Field-specific language and terminology should be avoided when possible; if terminology is essential, please provide definitions or a glossary.

We request that references be listed in the style of the American Psychological Association (APA) and that all information in the reference list be accurate and complete.

Submissions may be made online or emailed to lao@wabash.edu.

We pay $500 for essays we accept for publication in LiberalArtsOnline.

If you have questions about submitting an essay, or would like to discuss an idea for an article, please write to us at lao@wabash.edu, and someone from our editorial team will contact you.

We reserve the right to edit submissions for length and style, with authors having the opportunity to review their edited essays before publication. We also reserve the right to decide at any point not to publish a submission. We make every effort to inform authors promptly when we have decided not to disseminate an essay.

The following information appears with each published LiberalArtsOnline article:  “The comments published in LiberalArtsOnline reflect the opinions of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the Center of Inquiry or Wabash College. Responses may be sent to lao@wabash.edu. Comments may be quoted or republished in full, with attribution to the author, LiberalArtsOnline, and the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College.”