Integrative and Applied Learning: Linking Thinking and Doing in College
What about AI?
What are the most important learning outcomes students accomplish when they graduate with an undergraduate degree—in any subject? In other words, what is the value of a four-year degree?
The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) asked that question in the early 2000s and implemented a strategy to answer it from the ground up. They assembled a set of outcomes from the institutions that grant degrees rather than imposing them from above.
After several years of work, AAC&U produced a collection of sixteen outcomes and more than that, a set of sixteen rubrics, each written by a team of faculty with experience teaching toward the particular outcome it describes. Each rubric articulates developmental criteria across four score points, from Benchmark to Capstone, tracing how an ability matures over an undergraduate career. I served on the team that wrote the Reading Rubric and recruited P. David Pearson to bring a perspective to the discussion that only he could bring.
But in this essay, tempted as I am, I’m not focusing on Reading. I relied on all of these rubrics as models when working with faculty individually and in groups as the university assessment coordinator at California State Sacramento during an accreditation cycle. The Integrative and Applied Learning rubric gave me the language I needed to talk with department faculty about affordances of the more specific rubrics like reading, critical thinking, and ethical reasoning.
Integration is a much more expansive mental skillset than reading. The rubric spells out developmental criteria for the capacity to connect knowledge and insights across courses, disciplines, and lived experience, and to search for ways to bring that learning into new and complex situations. If the narrower outcomes name what a degree is worth in total, integrative and applied learning describes how the parts become a whole.
Integrative and Applied Learning: A Definition
The rubric opens with a definition that might give quantitative psychometricians heartburn:
“Integrative learning is an understanding and a disposition that a student builds across the curriculum and co-curriculum, from making simple connections among ideas and experiences to synthesizing and transferring learning to new, complex situations within and beyond the campus.”
Yes, but what is it?
There is a code word in the definition that I think resonated differently in 2010: disposition. The voluntary national accrediting body for teacher credential programs, NCATE, expected applicants to apply for their approval with a conceptual framework organized around the knowledge, skills, and dispositions its graduates should embody on gaining a credential to teach. The term “dispositions” had entered the education discourse much earlier when Lee Shulman published a paper using it.
Dispositions are much more powerful than interests or inclinations. A learner who has acquired this disposition to integrate wakes up in the morning expecting to draw from distributed funds of knowledge and has a history of investing in those funds. During this period, faculty teaching General Education courses were forming trios, three courses from different disciplines serving the same group of students and taught by collaborating instructors, opening spaces for integration across course boundaries.
Integrative learning is “a disposition,” not a body of content but a habit of mind, something a student becomes rather than something a student learns. It is enculturated “across the curriculum and co-curriculum,” meaning no single course owns it; it happens between courses, between coursework and student government, internships, residence halls, and community service.
Crucially, the construct reaches inward as well as outward. This learning also involves “internal changes in the learner,” including “the ability to adapt one’s intellectual skills, to contribute in a wide variety of situations, and to understand and develop individual purpose, values and ethics.”
The Benchmark Student
At score point 1, integration appears as recognition rather than construction. The rubric’s verbs tell the story: the student identifies, presents, uses in a basic way, describes. She notices connections but does not yet build them.
Beginning or novice students are expected to bring with them the regimented, closely monitored work habits they developed in high school: see the material, recognize the material, report the material. The rubric says she “…identifies connections between life experiences and…academic texts and ideas perceived as similar and related to own interests.” The sociology unit on poverty reminds her of her shifts at the food bank, so her reflection essay says it “relates.” That is a finished thought: the connection was noticed, and noticing was the assignment.
When prompted—and only when prompted—she “presents examples, facts, or theories from more than one field of study.” Asked to draw on two disciplines, she quotes an economist on minimum wage and a historian on the New Deal in adjacent paragraphs. Both are present; presenting was the task.
She “uses, in a basic way, skills gained in one situation in a new situation”—the regression from statistics appears in the marketing paper because the assignment requires one. It runs; it’s correct; it’s done. And she fulfills the assignment “in an appropriate form”: told to make a poster, she makes a competent poster. The genre is a container, not a choice.
Her reflection “describes own performances with general descriptors of success and failure.” The presentation went well. The lab was a disaster. These are honest reports, and from where she sits, complete ones. Unless her high school preparation was highly unusual, she has not been taught to examine her own work. Doing it has always been enough.
The Capstone Student
At score point 4, integration appears as construction rather than recognition. The rubric’s verbs change register: the student synthesizes, creates wholes, adapts and applies independently, envisions. The prompting that scaffolded the benchmark student has fallen away, replaced by the disposition itself.
From the inside, connection-making is no longer an assignment but a reflex. She “meaningfully synthesizes connections among experiences outside of the formal classroom...to deepen understanding of fields of study and to broaden own points of view.”
The food bank is no longer something her sociology unit reminds her of; it has become a site of inquiry in its own right, one that complicates what the textbook says about poverty and sends her back to the literature with sharper questions and a changed point of view.
She “independently creates wholes out of multiple parts.” The economist and the historian no longer sit in adjacent paragraphs; she has built an argument neither discipline could produce alone—that minimum wage debates recycle New Deal rhetoric because the underlying theory of labor never changed. The synthesis is hers, drawn from fields she chose because the problem demanded them.
Transfer now happens “to solve difficult problems or explore complex issues in original ways.” The regression appears in her marketing paper because she went looking for a tool equal to her question, and she can say what the model misses. Form, too, becomes an instrument: she fulfills the assignment “in ways that enhance meaning, making clear the interdependence of language and meaning, thought, and expression.”
And her reflection “envisions a future self.” The presentation that went well and the lab that was a disaster are now data points in a trajectory she is deliberately plotting as evidence of who she is becoming, gathered “across multiple and diverse contexts.” Examination of her work habits and productivity is no longer something done to her by an authority. It is her own work.
Closing the Loop: La Guardia Community College
LaGuardia Community College, part of the City University of New York, opened in 1971 in Long Island City, Queens, and serves one of the most diverse student bodies in the country with students from roughly 150 countries speaking dozens of languages, many of them first-generation, immigrant, and working adults.
Named for reform mayor Fiorello La Guardia, the college built a national reputation as a pedagogical innovator, particularly through its pioneering work in ePortfolios beginning in the early 2000s. During those years, ePortfolio topics at conferences were of great interest, and I attended a number of presentations from La Guardia.
That ePortfolio infrastructure made LaGuardia a natural home for integrative learning assessment: a platform where students collect, select, reflect, and connect their work across courses and semesters.
In its Learning Matters (2020) publication, the college explained that integrative learning was adopted as one of a handful of core learning outcomes and then did something rubrics alone cannot do: it threaded the construct through an actual student’s pathway.
Estefany’s ENG101 instructor, teaching toward Integrative Learning and Written Communication, had her read Twelve Years a Slave as both literature and historical artifact, then turns the questions toward her own life: How do you confront challenging circumstance and make choices?
Her communication course—HUC101, Introduction to Human Communication, designated for both Integrative Learning and Oral Communication—asked her to select a TED talk related to her major, analyze it, and deliver a presentation with a double payload: identifying the effective speech techniques she observed and articulating what she learned about her field.
In BTA202, the Accounting Capstone, Estefany advised a hypothetical company whose product may harm five percent of its customers, weighing sales, revenue, and a global marketplace against an ethical dilemma she must name, analyze, and resolve. Then, depositing the work in her ePortfolio, she identifies the skills and knowledge from previous courses that made the performance possible.
What About AI?
First, the impact won't be all bad, and the assignments already in this essay show why. AI can be a collaborative device on the text side of learning: surfacing historical context before Estefany reads Twelve Years a Slave, pressure-testing her interpretation against other readings, exploring the speech techniques in the TED talk before she builds her own presentation.
Used this way, the machine clears the path by providing background context and prompted discussion so the student reaches the brunt of the integrative work sooner. Of course, the student who asks AI to write her ePortfolio reflection has delegated the only part that mattered; the student who uses it to sharpen her questions and her approach to the task has gained an hour with a potentially helpful interlocutor.
What will make the difference is not the tool but the disposition, which means using AI wisely and well cannot be simple compliance boilerplate for the syllabus. AI is arguably the newest member of the integrative thinking family like it or not—a shotgun marriage? Knowing when to use the machine and when to avoid it might be like adjusting to a difficult newcomer to the family.
Nonetheless, years of research lie ahead before we will fully comprehend the effects of AI on perhaps the most powerful outcome marked by the undergraduate degree: integrative and applied learning.