The final entry in our series of comments on the Presidents’ Alliance for Excellence in Student Learning and Accountability.
Michael Poliakoff, policy director at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni:
We applaud the desire of university presidents to improve student learning and accountability on their campuses, although the idea is hardly new. A number of institutions in the alliance, in fact, distinguished themselves by their work in assessment and accountability for student learning before the organization was formed.
Does progress in these areas require another coalition? The alliance offers a four-point plan for presidents to gather, use, report and publicize student learning outcomes. What’s been stopping all institutions from doing this long before now?
The availability of appropriate tools has not been an obstacle. Hundreds of institutions around the nation—indeed, many within the alliance—use effective and remarkably inexpensive instruments to evaluate student learning, such as the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), the Measurement of Academic Proficiency and Progress (MAPP), and the Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency (CAAP).
The CLA in particular has generated important findings about undergraduate cognitive growth in different academic programs, and is in particularly wide use among participants in the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities’ Voluntary System of Accountability. The South Dakota Board of Regents for some years has used the CAAP to make general education assessment of students in its state colleges and universities a mandatory element in performance-based funding.
Rather than creating a new coalition and spending money on national conferences to celebrate their successes, wouldn’t it be better for campus leadership to use limited time and resources to further the hard but productive work of serious data collection and analysis? By serious data collection, we don’t mean portfolios—which, notably, is one of the options the alliance considers. Portfolios, although labor-intensive, offer at best supplementary material to understand an undergraduate’s development. At worst, they evade and distract from clear measures of academic progress. What higher-education leadership needs is objective assessment of academic value added, along with outcomes measures like licensure and professional examination results. It is well within reach.
Finally, it does not suffice to “[ensure] that at least once a year the governing board … receives and discusses a report on efforts,” as the outline states. Governing boards and the campus community need clear, reliable data that they can see in dashboard indicators as well as interpreted in a full report. Underlying any report on student learning must be accountability based on performance data. Press releases, national associations, and conferences don’t count.
Experts explore the quality and assessment of higher education.
2 Responses to Reactions to the Presidents’ Alliance, Part 3
rellim - November 18, 2010 at 9:25 am
It seems to me the writer’s assessment of assessments is backwards. Portfolios provide detailed, multi-faceted information about student learning — the kind of information that employers want and need to make qualitative decisions about who they would like in the workforce. It is the standardized tess that are “at best supplementary material to understand an undergraduate’s development.” Present a standardized test score to an employer and it is very likely they will ask for more.
The pursuit of comparable measures for institutions seems fruitless — how can you compare Michigan to Michigan State, Miami to Ohio State? All are fine schools and meaningful comparisons would take volumes and volumes of research and data, etc,etc. Education should be primarily about individuals and their learning. We can assemble rich representations of students’ learning through their portfolios — program by program — and gain a real picture of the individual characteristics of each institution and program. Looking for an easy, supposedly comparable measure of general outcomes while ignoring learning in the major is a poor shortcut to assessing quality of teaching and learning.
barbarawright - November 19, 2010 at 11:20 am
Rellim has it exactly right: it’s portfolios (and capstones, signature assignments, performances in internships, research projects, etc.) that truly demonstrate what students know and can do, not artificially concocted, tightly structured instruments like the ones named above. AAC&U’s Hart surveys of employers (2008, 2010) confirm Rellim’s point. Employers don’t trust grades, GPA, or percentile scores; they want authentic demonstrations of what students can actually do.
The attraction of MAAP, CAAP, CLA and others is “comparability.” In the US, at least part of the public and policy community seems to think we need to be able to compare one institution against another. But this is the wrong comparison. Institutions need to define the standard of student achievement they expect from a graduate. They should make this expectation transparent and publicly available. It will differ legitimately from institution to institution, depending upon mission, location, the goals of the student body, and many other factors.
The meaningful “comparison” then becomes the difference between 100% of students at that institution achieving that level of learning upon graduation, and the actual proportion achieving it. Anything else is beside the point.