Increasing the percentage of college graduates in the United States has become a collective aspiration of policy makers, advocates for higher education, and President Obama. But this push for quantity will mean little if colleges cannot demonstrate the quality of the degrees they confer, says an advocacy group.
The group, the New Leadership Alliance for Student Learning and Accountability, released today a set of guidelines it says will help colleges assess and improve student achievement and, in the process, better demonstrate the quality of their offerings.
The guidelines are being presented at the Council for Higher Education Accreditation’s annual meeting in Washington, with endorsements from 27 organizations, chiefly accreditors and associations.
The guidelines stake out four broad principles of assessment and accountability for a college to follow: setting ambitious goals for the outcomes of undergraduate education; gathering evidence about how the institution is faring in pursuit of those outcomes; using that evidence to improve learning; and sharing the results.
The essential idea is to clearly articulate and make intentional the objectives that guide student learning, said David C. Paris, executive director of the alliance. “That’s our goal,” he said, “an evidence-based profession.”
The alliance was started in 2009 by several higher-education leaders and foundations to respond to growing calls for accountability in the sector. The assumption was that colleges needed to define how they would substantiate student learning—or lawmakers would do it for them.
The new guidelines expand on the alliance’s previous efforts, including a statement of principles to guide student learning, which were released in 2008, and a pledge by more than 100 college presidents to take steps at their institutions that are largely identical to the ones set out in the new guidelines.
Other organizations have also tackled issues related to assessing student learning and the quality of higher education. For example, the Lumina Foundation for Education’s Degree Qualifications Profile defines the knowledge and skills students should acquire across disciplines for various levels of degrees. The National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment has amassed research on student learning, and the Association of American Colleges and Universities has issued reports and rubrics to improve assessment.
The New Leadership Alliance’s guidelines make reference to these and other efforts. Mr. Paris said the alliance is pursuing a strategy of acquiring endorsements from other organizations and institutions, which he hopes will, over time, reflect widespread acceptance of the guidelines. He cited as a precedent the American Association of University Professors’ 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, which informs the policies of many institutions and has been endorsed by more than 215 disciplinary societies and scholarly groups.
Role of Faculty?
Faculty groups have also weighed in on assessment, though such groups are generally absent from the list of endorsers of the alliance’s guidelines.
Sandra Schroeder, chair of the American Federation of Teachers’ higher-education program and policy council, praised the alliance’s new guidelines for making clear that student success depends on a “systematic, well considered approach at the institutional level” rather than relying on a single measure to quantify student learning.
But she questioned how effective institutional efforts to assess student learning can be when a majority of faculty serve in contingent positions. “Too many faculty are not included in the academic decision making at their institutions or within the department in which they teach,” Ms. Schroeder said in an e-mail. “If we truly want to improve student success at our colleges and universities, we must invest in our colleges and universities, and in particular, we must invest our resources in front-line educators and involve them in this important policy discussion.”
Jack E. Rossmann, professor emeritus of psychology at Macalester College and chair of the AAUP’s Accreditation Committee, expanded on that critique, saying that the guidelines present a good summary of the latest thinking about assessment, but reflect a “curious lack of emphasis on the role of faculty.”
Mr. Paris, formerly a political scientist and administrator at Hamilton College, in New York, said faculty members play an important role in the guidelines because they will be gathering appropriate evidence, deciding on measures, and figuring out how to use evidence to improve results. He also noted that the American Psychological Association had endorsed the guidelines, and said other disciplinary societies seemed receptive.
Mr. Rossmann also found common ground in an area of the debate about assessment that has served as fodder for disagreement in the past. He said it was reasonable for the alliance to push for institutions to adopt, and make readily available, students’ scores on a standardized measure of student learning.
The alliance said that such measures, such as the Collegiate Learning Assessment or the Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency, should be chosen by the institution and used to improve performance, not for ranking.
“If it’s used wisely and carefully,” Mr. Rossmann said, “those kinds of benchmarking efforts can be of value.”
