Assessment News
In his April 24, 2012 article entitled "Assessing Higher Education" found in the Other Views section of News & Observer, David Brooks writes:
"There's an atmosphere of grand fragility hanging over America's colleges. The grandeur comes from the surging application rates, the international renown, the fancy new dining and athletic facilities. The fragility comes from the fact that colleges are charging more money, but it's not clear how much actual benefit they are providing.
"Colleges are supposed to produce learning. But in their landmark study, "Academically Adrift," Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa found that, on average, students experienced a pathetic 7 percentage point gain in skills during their first two years in college and a marginal gain in the two years after that....
"This research followed the Wabash Study, which found that student motivation actually declines over the first year in college. Meanwhile, according to surveys of employers, only a quarter of college graduates have the writing and thinking skills necessary to do their jobs.
"In..."We're Losing Our Minds," Richard P. Keeling and Richard H. Hersh argue that many colleges and universities see themselves passively as a kind of bank with intellectual assets that are available to the students...."
"This is an unstable situation. At some point, parents are going to decide that $160,000 is too high a price if all you get is an empty credential and a fancy car-window sticker.
"One part of the solution is found in three little words: value-added assessments. Colleges have to test more to find out how they're doing.
"In 2006, the Spellings commission...recommended a serious accountability regime. Specifically...using a standardized test called the Collegiate Learning Assessment to provide accountability data. Colleges and grad schools use standardized achievement tests to measure students on the way in; why shouldn't they use them to measure students on the way out?
"If you go to the Web page of the Association of American Colleges and Universities and click on "assessment," you will find a dazzling array of experiments that institutions are running to figure out how to measure learning....
"The challenge is not getting educators to embrace the idea of assessment. It's mobilizing them to actually enact it in a way that's real and transparent to outsiders.
"The second challenge is deciding whether testing should be tied to federal dollars or more voluntary....
"Given how little we know about how to test college students, the voluntary approach is probably best for now....
"This is the beginning of college reform. If you've got a student at or applying to college, ask the administrators these questions: ‘How much do students here learn? How do you know?'"
Note: Read the complete article, entitled "Assessing Higher Education". Mr. Brooks is a columnist for The New York Times.