Students would be likely to learn more in college and academic rigor would be increased, say two higher-education leaders, if faculty members and accountability advocates focused on a deceptively simple idea: Ask students to produce original work and judge them on it, not on how they perform on standardized tests or how many hours they spend in class.
This idea underlies a new paper, by Peter T. Ewell, vice president of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, and its afterword, by Carol Geary Schneider, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities.
The paper and afterword were released on Thursday by the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment, which advocates for the use of assessment data to improve undergraduate education.
The two documents elaborate on a framework for student learning, called the Degree Qualifications Profile, put forth two years ago by the Lumina Foundation, which also supports the assessment institute. The degree profile has since been tested by about 220 colleges and is undergoing revision.
The degree profile seeks to consistently and clearly describe common principles about what a college degree means at different levels of attainment, while still allowing for variations in disciplines and institutions.
The paper and its afterword offer practical examples of how the degree profile works while also seeking to reinvigorate the effort. The documents also arrive as worries fester about how much students learn, and interest grows in finding new ways to certify student learning beyond traditional measures like how much time students spend in class or how many credits they amass.
The paper and afterword aim to rebut critics who accuse those behind the degree profile of seeking to pave the way for widespread standardized testing in higher education.
The opposite is true, Ms. Schneider wrote. The degree profile was designed to de-emphasize standardized tests and to bring faculty judgment and the work of students to the center of higher education.
“College must prepare learners to deal with the complex and uncertain, not just with the rote and routine,” she wrote. “Multiple-choice tests will not meet this standard.”
Making ‘Mush’ Solid
Ms. Schneider and Mr. Ewell drafted the degree profile two years ago with Clifford Adelman, a senior associate at the Institute for Higher Education Policy, and Paul L. Gaston, III, a professor of English at Kent State University.
The degree profile is an effort to describe what students who earn associate, bachelor’s, or master’s degrees should be able to do by the time they graduate. It spells out reference points for what students should be learning and demonstrating at the three degree levels, and does so in five areas: broad, integrative knowledge; specialized knowledge; intellectual skills; applied learning; and civic learning.
Quickly grasping the degree profile is not easy. The graphical representation of it looks like a pentagon being stretched by a multicolored spider’s web. An expert who was receptive to the degree profile described the task of finding practical ways to use it as “pretty mushy stuff.”
Mr. Ewell’s paper seeks to bring some solidity to the mush. The degree profile pushes faculty members to assign students tasks in which they must produce something, whether a research paper, a class project, a portfolio of work, or a performance, he wrote.
“Merely identifying a ‘correct’ answer from a set of posed alternatives is not a production task,” Mr. Ewell wrote, referring to the common use of multiple-choice tests. “Simply put, the construction of the assignment must unavoidably elicit a demonstration of the competency.”
Learning outcomes for many courses and syllabi include language like “appreciate” or “value,” which the degree profile’s authors find vague and unlikely to prod students to create work that demonstrates what they know. Instead, the degree profile emphasizes concrete, active verbs like “construct,” “explain,” “assess,” and “create.”
Mr. Ewell also offered examples of the degree profile in action.
A student at the bachelor’s level, for instance, might demonstrate his or her specialized knowledge by writing a short essay analyzing the logic of creationists who argue that the Second Law of Thermodynamics supports their point of view. The natural direction of change is from complexity to simplicity, the law states, so the complex human life form cannot have evolved from more primitive forms of life, some creationists say. The assignment might tell students to describe the kind of logic the creationists are using and to analyze the critiques for and against their argument.
Once students write such an essay, faculty members must rigorously evaluate the work. An increasingly common tool used for this purpose is a rubric, or a structured grading guide.
Such assignments and evaluations are often not the norm, the authors acknowledge. If professors use multiple-choice tests, grade essays according to opaque standards, or spend more time lecturing students than asking them to create work of their own, it reflects how most of them were trained.
“We’re not taught to think about these things in graduate school,” said Mr. Adelman. One objective of the degree profile, he said, is to put more power in the hands of faculty members. But such a transition also would put more pressure on them to teach students and to help them improve.
Faculty members will need to change their assignments so they elicit the kind of behavior supported by the degree profile.
“You do this stuff all the time,” Mr. Adelman said, describing the message to faculty members. “Just do it better.”
