The Bush administration, as part of its campaign to get colleges to improve their programs of self-assessment, has awarded three university associations $2.4-million in grants to study new and different methods of student testing.
The grant money is being shared by the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, the Association of American Colleges and Universities, and the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges.
The work will include testing the “validity, comparability, and appropriate uses of a variety of assessment approaches,” the Association of American Colleges and Universities said in a written statement.
The education secretary, Margaret Spellings, has been pushing colleges to improve how they measure the educational improvement of their students, and to better report those data to the public. —Paul Basken
