University Business - June 2007 - (Page 37)

INDEPENDENT OUTLOOK Assessing Assessment With increased accountability on higher ed leaders’ agenda for years, learning outcomes should be demonstrated with institutional autonomy intact. By Richard Ekman OST A MER ICA NS R E portedly believe that colleges and universities do a good job of educating students, but that hasn’t prevented a debate from intensifying about the best ways to demonstrate students’ “learning outcomes.” Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings’ Commission on the Future of Higher Education and her follow-up statements are only the most recent—if the most visible—calls for such evidence of institutional effectiveness. Over the past decade, all of the regional accrediting bodies had already introduced steps to encourage institutions to focus on the results, rather than the “inputs” of a college education—and to good effect. Unfortunately, the commission’s early statements called for a government-run, mandatory, one-size-fits-all test of college students’ learning outcomes. Commissioners and the secretary heard from most quarters that this unilateral approach was needlessly heavy-handed. No one should want a system of higher education in the United States that is run directly by the national government. Other countries with nationalized systems of higher education offer sufficiently negative examples for any sensible person to think twice about that. In a letter to commission chair Charles Miller early last year on behalf of small and mid-sized private colleges and universities, I expressed concern about the prospect of a government-controlled testing regimen that would run roughshod over institutional autonomy and individual privacy. I emphasized the progress already M A government-controlled testing regimen would run roughshod over institutional autonomy and individual privacy. being made by the voluntary actions of colleges and universities, individually and together, on increased accountability. NONGOVERNMENTAL APPROACHES In 2002—long before Secretary Spellings convened her commission—the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) became the first association to embrace the importance of nongovernmental approaches to measuring educational effectiveness. It was CIC’s view that such evidence would help to spur institutional improvement and to provide valuable information about institutional effectiveness of interest to students, parents, donors, and others. More recently, the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities have begun to develop guidelines for principles of outcomes assessment in public institutions. CIC is working with three dozen of its member institutions that have been using the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) for several years now. From an even earlier date, more than 300 CIC colleges and universities have used the National Survey of Student Engagement. NSSE measures how extensively an institution’s students participate in pedagogical approaches that are proven to engage students actively in their academic programs. NSSE looks at how students spend their time rather than results—namely, what they wind up learning. The CLA is one of the first assessment tools to provide direct evidence of the student learning that occurs over a typical four-year college program. Taken together, NSSE and CLA provide a useful picture of institutional effectiveness. The CLA measures capabilities that cut across specific major fields of study— capabilities such as critical thinking, analytic reasoning, problem solving, and written communication. The CLA is fundamentally different from governmentmandated testing under the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. All of the CLA measures are open-ended, instead of consisting of multiple-choice questions. The institution, not the student, is what is being measured with the CLA. And, unlike with NCLB-mandated testing, there is no fixed standard of proficiency with the CLA; progress is relative, depending on the characteristics of the students enrolled at the institution. It is cognitive growth from freshman to senior year that is measured. Richard Ekman is president of The Council of Independent Colleges, www.cic.edu. www.universitybusiness.com June 2007 | 37 http://www.cic.edu http://www.universitybusiness.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of University Business - June 2007

Contents
College Index
Company Index
Advisory Board
Editor's Note
Virginia Tech Coverage
Sense of Place
Viewpoint
Admissions
On The Hill
Future Shock
Independent Outlook
Internet Technology
I Wanna Be Rich
Smart and Sustainable
Walking the Talk
Steering Toward Sustainability
An Organizing Principle for Colleges and Universities
News Shorts
News Shorts
It’s Not Easy Eating Green
Facilities Focus
The New Face of ERP
Document Management Across Campus
What's New
Direct Connect
Calendar of Events
End Note
Annual Directory of Higher Education Consultants

University Business - June 2007

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