Colleges and universities are posting more information on their Web sites about whether their students are learning, but most such data are still available only on internal sites, says a report released on Monday by the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment.
The report, "Making Student Learning Evidence Transparent: The State of the Art," is part of a broader effort by the institute to monitor how much information colleges and universities are providing upfront to parents and students. Often, the report says, colleges and universities don't provide easily digestible information about student learning that prospective students and parents can understand and use to make their college choices. Student learning measures might consist of course grades, course evaluations, surveys, and interviews, says the report.
For the report, researchers at the institute looked at 200 publicly accessible college and university Web sites and gathered data on the information the institutions made available.
The report says that two of four national efforts at higher-education openness—the University and College Accountability Network and Achieving the Dream—had hardly any member institutions that posted their student-learning results online. No member of the accountability network posted the information, the group said, because there was no demand for it, and Achieving the Dream saw only 7 percent of its institutions publish the data.
By contrast, two similar efforts—Transparency by Design and the Voluntary System of Accountability—saw extremely high proportions of their participating institutions post student-learning information.
Private colleges tend to report student learning less often than public institutions do, and recently accredited institutions posted the information more often than any other, according to the report. Only a third of the institutions provided information on how they were using the student-learning assessments.
