Eastern professor from Middletown appointed AAC&U senior fellow
Willimantic, CT (08/20/2025) — Sukeshini Grandhi of Middletown, professor of business administration at Eastern Connecticut State University, has been appointed a senior fellow with the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), where she is working with the Office of Curricular, Pedagogical, and Digital Innovation.
Grandhi joins a team of educators and innovators dedicated to improving the learning experiences of undergraduate students. "It's a great opportunity to dig deeper into teaching and curriculum alongside educators from across the country who are genuinely passionate about undergraduate learning," she wrote.
As part of the fellowship, Grandhi's work deals largely with the AAC&U's VALUE (Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education) program, which aims to articulate definitions and descriptions of clear learning outcomes.
Specifically, Grandhi aims to improve the construction of rubrics, or documents outlining grading criteria for a given assignment. Rubrics are a key piece of VALUE's repertoire of instructional resources, as the program aligns with Grandhi's goal of innovating rubric construction.
"These VALUE rubrics aren't meant to be prescriptive but provide common language and framework for educators and universities to use as appropriate, including making modifications to cater to each university's needs," explained Grandhi.
To this end, she takes inspiration from VALUE as a "superset" of learning outcomes encompassing the five learning outcomes in Eastern's liberal arts core (ELAC) curriculum: critical thinking, ethical reasoning, quantitative literacy, creativity, and communication.
Grandhi's interest in instructional innovation started several years ago, when she was appointed as Eastern's university assessment coordinator. This sparked her "intellectual curiosity" in pedagogy in addition to her discipline, she said.
More recently, Grandhi worked closely with Julia DeLapp, director of Eastern's Center for Teaching, Learning, and Assessment (CTLA) and political science Professor Courtney Broscious, the previous university assessment coordinator, when developing an assessment plan for ELAC, which rolled out last fall.
"Being directly involved in collecting and analyzing ELAC student learning outcomes has really helped me understand the practical side of assessment - where the challenges are, where there's opportunity, and how all of it connects to student engagement in the classroom," Grandhi wrote.
"This hands-on experience shapes the way I think about the VALUE rubrics and helps me contribute to AAC&U's work in a way that feels real and timely."
Grandhi sees her work as university assessment coordinator and her research with the AAC&U as mutually beneficial. "What I learn from working with faculty and students at Eastern gives me real-world insights that I can take into conversations with other AAC&U Senior Fellows," she wrote.
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Eastern Connecticut State University is the state of Connecticut's public liberal arts university, serving upwards of 4,000 students annually on its Willimantic campus. A residential campus offering 41 majors and 68 minors, Eastern offers students a strong liberal arts foundation grounded in a variety of applied learning opportunities. Ranked among the top 25 public institutions in the North by U.S. News & World Report in its 2024-25 Best Colleges ratings, Eastern has also been awarded 'Green Campus' status by the Princeton Review 15 years in a row. For more information, visit www.easternct.edu.
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Sukeshine Grandhi
Eastern Connecticut State University
Michael Rouleau, (860) 465-0172, rouleaum@easternct.edu; universityrelations@easternct.eduShare this Story
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