Santa Fe, N.M. — Colleges are doing more to assess student learning than higher-education officials and policy makers may think, Stanley O. Ikenberry, a former president of the American Council on Education, told state higher-education leaders who are gathered here this week for an annual meeting.
But Mr. Ikenberry, who is now a co-principal investigator for the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment, said today that the bigger problem may be that campuses are not doing enough to use the data they collect to improve teaching and learning.
“The risk is learning-outcome assessments can be an end in themselves,” he said at the meeting, of the State Higher Education Executive Officers. Campuses and state officials should do more to stress the broader social purpose of assessing learning, he said, and do more to focus attention on how the data can be used to make improvements.
Mr. Ikenberry gave a preview of findings from a survey the learning-outcomes institute conducted of student-learning assessment at accredited, degree-granting institutions. He said a final report would be released by early fall.
Almost 80 percent of the 1,500 colleges that responded to the survey, which was sent to about 2,800 campuses in March, said they had articulated a common set of learning outcomes for their students. The survey was sent to both two- and four-year colleges as well as public, private, and for-profit ones.
The most-common response to how institutions use information about how well those learning objectives are met was to fulfill accreditation requirements, according to Mr. Ikenberry.
The survey found that the most-common tool the responding colleges use to assess learning outcomes is a survey of alumni, employers, students, or some combination of those groups, Mr. Ikenberry said. A sizable number of campuses, but less than half of respondents, said they used some form of standardized test to measure improvements in student learning, such as the Collegiate Learning Assessment.
In the survey, campus officials reported significant resistance from faculty members to institutional efforts to measure student learning, Mr. Ikenberry said. And the assessments are being done “on a shoestring,” he added, with two-thirds of respondents saying they devote the equivalent of one full-time employee or less to that work. —Sara Hebel