Experts explore the quality and assessment of higher education.
November 2, 2010, 3:32 pm
The NRC Rankings: Further Thoughts From Stephen Stigler
Five weeks ago, the National Research Council released its long-awaited rankings and assessments of American doctoral programs.
Many institutions are already making use of the avalanche of data in the NRC report. The University of Florida has announced a comprehensive review of its doctoral programs. And administrators at Ohio State University say that the NRC project helped provide a structure for an continuing assessment of doctoral programs there.
At the same time, doubts about the quality and accuracy of the NRC’s analyses have not died down. A nontrivial number of doctoral programs seem to have given the NRC incorrect counts of the number of faculty members involved in their programs. Such errors could cause large ripple effects because several of the NRC’s measures were analyzed on a per-faculty-member basis. If your program’s faculty denominator is too large, its …
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October 29, 2010, 5:31 pm
Re-engineering: How One Department Tinkered With Its Instructional Model
Here’s a bit more background on the recent changes in the first-year courses at Villanova University’s College of Engineering, which were briefly sketched in this week’s article about department-level reforms in instruction and assessment.
Non-engineers, don’t be too quick to assume that this post has nothing to do with you. Engineering programs are dealing with an especially sharp version of a challenge that faces all of higher education. Employers and other stakeholders want universities to produce a larger and more diverse work force in engineering, so there’s a growing consensus that high sophomore-attrition rates are no longer acceptable.
But those same stakeholders will come down hard on any programs whose graduates aren’t competent engineers. So the goal, at Villanova and elsewhere, is to improve completion without lowering academic standards.
Villanova’s…
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October 28, 2010, 11:26 am
In Student-Learning Debate, Some Forgotten Voices
When higher-ed administrators, trustees, accreditors, foundation officers, and the news media talk about assessing student learning, two voices are often conspicuously missing.
One is the voice of students themselves. (That’s not our topic today.)
The other is scholarly societies. The disciplinary associations in biology, political science, and history—to take just three examples—have well-established, large-scale programs aimed at assessing and improving the quality of instruction in their fields. Most disciplinary groups also publish journals dedicated to teaching and learning.
Not all of those discipline-level projects are great. Some are much better than others. The point here is simply that the projects exist, and that they reach thousands of faculty members every year. But they’re often weirdly ignored in national conversations about college quality.
Take, for…
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October 27, 2010, 5:53 pm
Learning Assessment: The Regional Accreditors’ Role
And now for this week’s Rorschach test.
The National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment has just released a white paper about the regional accreditors’ role in prodding colleges to assess their students’ learning.
The paper, “Regional Accreditation and Student Learning Outcomes: Mapping the Territory,” begins with quotations from four pseudonymous college presidents who took part in a focus group last year.
All four presidents suggested that their campuses’ learning-assessment projects are fueled by Fear of Accreditors. One said that a regional accreditor “came down on us hard over assessment.” Another said, “Accreditation visit coming up. This drives what we need to do for assessment.”
Here’s where the Rorschach test kicks in.
Accountability hawks will read those presidents’ quotes and think, “See? I knew it. Colleges only get serious about…
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October 11, 2010, 8:34 am
Q&A: The Uncertain Future of Transcript Reform
In my last post here, I mentioned that prospective employers tend to have a difficult time interpreting undergraduate transcripts.
Course titles are often mysterious, leaving employers puzzled about what specific skills and knowledge students have mastered. Grade distributions vary widely among instructors, majors, and institutions. And how students are assessed is largely unknown to those outside of—and even inside—higher education.
A handful of institutions, including Indiana University, have tried to make students’ records more comprehensible by creating expanded transcripts that include information about the grade distribution within each course.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is the latest institution to attempt transcript reform. Andrew Perrin, an associate professor of sociology at North Carolina, has worked for several years to guide a resolution …
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October 5, 2010, 2:41 pm
Exhibit A in the NRC Rankings’ Problems
In his commentary the other day on the National Research Council’s assessments of doctoral programs, Jason Thomas Parker warned, “By outsourcing evaluation of our doctoral programs to an external agency, we allow ourselves to play the double game of insulating ourselves from the criticisms they may raise by questioning their accuracy, while embracing the praise they bestow.”
One program that has embraced the NRC’s praise is Ohio State University’s School of Communication, whose doctoral program received some impressive numbers in the new report. In an announcement last week, the program trumpeted its faculty’s “absolute rank of #1 in research activity” and the program’s overall “#3 ranking in the field.”
All of that may be true, and it may be well earned. But take note: Ohio State’s School of Communication is (almost literally) the poster child for potential inaccuracies in the NRC…
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September 26, 2010, 5:23 pm
The NRC Report: Provosts in Electrified Cages
It’s actually happening this time. On Tuesday at 1 p.m. Eastern time, the National Research Council will lift the curtain on its long-awaited assessments of U.S. doctoral programs.
The research council will present the data in the form of a gigantic Excel file that will allow users to sort programs according to whatever criteria are most interesting to them: research productivity, faculty diversity, student financial aid, and so on. The Chronicle will also unveil some interactive data tools on Tuesday.
As most of our readers probably know by now, the new report is based on fundamentally different methods than the NRC’s previous two efforts to rank doctoral programs, which appeared in 1982 and 1995. The earlier reports were based heavily on reputational surveys, but the new one is grounded in programs’ objective characteristics, including such measures as faculty citation rates and…
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September 20, 2010, 12:00 pm
Making College Degrees Easier to Interpret
Over the past few decades, the central purpose of undergraduate education in the United States has steadily evolved away from elite studies in the liberal arts and toward course work that prepares students for successful careers in their chosen fields. Regardless of whether this trend is the result of the forces of democracy or “the closing of the American mind,” its consequences have altered both the makeup of colleges’ student bodies and institutions’ principal missions.
Today, the large majority of students enrolled in colleges and universities—mostly from the middle and working classes—are pursuing higher education primarily to earn a valuable degree. These students assume that this record of achievement will lead to a satisfying job with a nice salary; so, they attend classes, write research papers, hold internships, and study, all with the aim of expanding their options in…
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September 16, 2010, 11:48 am
Perverse-Incentives Watch: ‘Times Higher Education’ Edition
If higher-ed-ranking exercises make you cringe, maybe you should have planned a long backcountry camping trip for September.
Last week saw the release of the latest international university rankings from Quacquarelli Symonds. Today comes the unveiling of the new-model Times Higher Education World University Rankings. And on September 28, the National Research Council will finally uncork its long-delayed assessments and rankings of U.S. doctoral programs.
All three projects are trying to reduce their reliance on subjective, reputational surveys, and to pay more attention to quantitative measures like citation counts and student-faculty ratios.
The problem they’re trying to solve, of course, is that reputational surveys sometimes elicit stale, secondhand opinions about which academic programs are strongest. “Hard” quantitative measures, the theory goes, will allow the world to notice…
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September 8, 2010, 12:38 pm
Learning Assessments: Let the Faculty Lead the Way
(Yesterday we took a slightly glib look at faculty members’ fear and loathing of learning-assessment projects. Today we’re pleased to offer a more serious contribution, from Pat Hutchings, a senior associate with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, who has written about this topic for several years. —Ed.)
The barriers to faculty involvement in assessment have been extensively catalogued over the years. Promotion and tenure systems do not reward such work. Time is short and other agendas loom larger. Most faculty members have no formal training in assessment—or, for that matter, in teaching and course design. Given developments in K-12, there are concerns, too, about the misuse of data, and skepticism about whether assessment brings real benefits to learners. These and other impediments are widespread and well known, and they no doubt help to explain the findings from…
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