The Collegiate Learning Assessment examination is usually discussed in terms of its use as a tool for comparing colleges’ strengths. Some people love that project, and others are deeply skeptical. But no one seems to have anything bad to say about a quieter, under-the-radar purpose of the CLA: as a tool for inspiring improvements in classroom instruction.
One campus that has tried to use the exam in that way is Fayetteville State University, a historically black institution in North Carolina. More than two dozen faculty members there have begun to create course assignments that mimic the CLA’s format: In-class essays where students are expected to synthesize different kinds of data and to present a coherent argument.
“This kind of work is especially important for an institution like ours, where students may not have been as fully engaged in their academic careers before they arrive here,” says Peter A. Valenti, a professor of English and a leader of the campus’s CLA efforts.
“If students can use the CLA experience to learn how to read texts and create an original argument and present it to an audience, then we’re really giving them something that will help them no matter what their major is or what their career is,” Mr. Valenti says. “If we encourage those skills from the time they arrive here, and if the CLA experience is something that they encounter again and again here, then I think it will make a real difference.”
Fayetteville State’s CLA-inspired projects are archived on a university Web site. Here are two examples:
In two composition classes, Elizabeth Bir, an assistant professor of English, asked students to write analytical essays about whether a two-year technical college or a four-year liberal-arts education would be a better investment for a low-income student who hopes to support his family over the long term.
She gave them six documents to assess, including several that contained irrelevant information such as data about population and income in certain North Carolina counties.
“A successful response to my prompt required students to read and evaluate both narrative and quantitative data,” Ms. Bir wrote in her project report. “My goal was for students to read all the information and figure out what was useful in answering the question, to use only that information, and to be able to explain why they discarded the rest.”
Another assistant professor of English, Dean Swinford, asked his students to write essays about whether Fayetteville State should expand its study-abroad programs. Like Ms. Bir, Mr. Swinford included documents with vague, misleading, or irrelevant information, and expected his students to notice those problems.
People who parsed the documents carefully, Mr. Swinford wrote in his report, would see “a variety of discrepancies in the data provided that students needed to discuss in order to provide an effective exploration of the topic. For example, Document B includes a study that shows that study-abroad participants actually received a lower GPA.”
If Fayetteville State students encounter classroom exercises like those seven or eight times a semester, they’re likely to improve their scores when they take the actual CLA exam. But that does not mean, Mr. Valenti says, that this is a hollow teaching-to-the-test project. The thinking and writing skills captured by the assessment test, he says, are genuinely fundamental to a high-quality college education.
“We’re an institution that has not always fared well when you pull out the standardized tests,” Mr. Valenti says. “The CLA is the best hope that I’ve seen for helping us to do better.”
