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December 05, 2007, 07:40 PM ET
Ample Data Exist on Learning Outcomes
A friend who allowed he had read my last posting asked, barely masking a smirk, “Oh yeah, what about learning outcomes?” I looked him in the eye and said, “The same holds true: We have always had a fair amount of data reflecting higher education’s learning outcomes.”
Much of the current hue and cry about learning outcomes began with Pat Callan’s Measuring Up 2000. At my friend Tom Erhlich’s urging, I believe — Tom was a member of Pat’s board — the first report card included “learning” as a measurable category and then gave each of the 50 states an incomplete because “All states lack information on the educational performance of college students that would permit systematic state or national comparisons.”
NSSE began with the same logic. Since it was not possible to measure learning, NSSE was established to measure student engagement instead, arguing that current research had demonstrated that sustained engagement produced good learning outcomes.
I argued then and have continued to argue since that in fact we have had ample evidence with which to judge the quality of learning outcomes for most institutions and for all institutional groupings. What I had in mind were the host of tests college seniors and sometimes juniors take preparing for post-baccalaureate study: GREs, MCATs, LSATs, and GMATs to name the most obvious. For any given institution, the proportion of students taking those tests and their median score really are sufficient proxies for successful outcomes — recognizing, of course, that in higher education outcomes are always correlated with inputs.
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