Kevin Carey says:
I'm posting the Utah Final Tuning USA Report here. Take a look! It describes why the historians and physics professors in Utah think this is a good idea, what they did, and what they came up with in terms of outcomes and expectations for students. Nobody thinks the process is perfect or entirely complete, but it's fair to say they believe it was valuable and worth continuing.And now, for the rest of the story...
Sherman Dorn discusses another reason why we ought to be really skeptical about using standardized instruments to measure general education learning outcomes.
On its face, the CLA looks like a plausible assessment of reasoning skills in a written context.And now, for the rest of the story...
But a funny thing happens once you remove either type of task from the subject in which it's embedded: those who are rating student responses do not have the substantive expertise to check student assertions.
...the scoring guidelines appear to ignore the veracity of student statements. It is entirely about whether someone can construct or criticize an argument in response to prompts.
...maybe we should acknowledge that if it's to have any value, a general-education program has to have some substance, and assessments of its success need to be rooted in the areas it putatively requires some learning in. Not writing and reasoning in general but writing and reasoning about the stuff that's in the gen-ed curriculum.
Grab your cup of coffee, relax, and settle down with this article from today's Inside Higher Ed. It's long and it will require re-reading for full understanding, but the questions Adelman asks and the thinking his questions might provoke make it worth the effort. A quote to get you going...
We are now surrounded by a veritable industry producing enormous quantities of data and information on various performances of institutions of higher education in the name of something called “accountability,” and it is fair to ask where this production sits in terms of the potential meaning of its banner. It is also necessary to note that, in the rhetoric of higher education, “institution” is usually the subject of sentences including “accountability,” as if a single entity were responsible for a raft of consequences. But, as noted below, when our students attend three or four schools, the subject of these sentences is considerably weakened in terms of what happens to those students. The relationship is attenuated.And now, for the rest of the story...
For now we start with a postulate: however we define accountability, we are describing a relationship in which obligations and responsibilities dwell. Our questions sound simple: What kind of relationship? What kind of obligations? What kind of responsibilities? What actions within the relationship justify its type? The exploration is conducted not to convince you that one configuration is “better” than another, rather to make sure that we all think better about the dynamics of each one.
Several stories in the higher ed press report on the recent meeting of NAFSA: Association of International Educators conference, which concluded last Friday. Several sessions focused on the Bologna Process and how other countries, including the United States, are adapting elements of it. A few quotes from the Inside Higher Ed story:
...the transformation of European higher education in the past 11 years has been immense. The process, which is premised on “harmonizing” higher education systems throughout Europe and promoting mobility and credit transfer, has largely revolved around improving quality assurance mechanisms and developing comparable degree frameworks and student learning outcomes in specific disciplines. As part of this, universities have moved toward standardized degree cycles (including, in many countries, the three-year bachelor’s degree, which has caused headaches for graduate admissions officers in the United States). They’ve also stated expectations for what those degrees should mean.This last is a particular problem, especially as so many institutions race headlong toward putting more and more courses online. A "semester credit hour" (SCH) used to equate to the amount of time spent in class per week. In the new world of online education, this has become completely meaningless. As long as we were starting with courses originally designed for face-to-face delivery and retooling them for online delivery, it wasn't too hard to keep the content the same in terms of SCHs. But now that courses are being designed from scratch for online delivery, those guidelines are gone. So how do you determine what the content of a course is that's supposed to be worth, say, three SCHs at the freshman level, the junior level?
A March report on the progress of the Bologna Process by the European University Association found that 77 percent of universities have reviewed the curriculums in all departments under the Bologna Process (compared to 55 percent in 2007). In addition, 53 percent of universities said that learning outcomes have been developed for all courses and 32 percent for some courses. “Bologna,” the association concluded, “has acted as a catalyst to improve quality of teaching and move towards student-centered learning.
In the United States, the Lumina Foundation for Education has plans to build upon a Bologna-inspired pilot project in which universities in three states moved toward “tuning” their degrees in six different fields of study. As part of the initial project, “Tuning USA,” faculty in Indiana (in education, chemistry and history), Minnesota (in graphic design and biology) and Utah (in history and physics) jointly conducted a four-way survey. For each discipline they asked employers, alumni, current students, and other faculty to identify general and subject-specific competencies and rank them. “So you begin to develop a picture of the subject,” explained Birtwistle, who is a consultant to the Lumina project. “You begin to frame the subject, you begin to be able to say what the subject is, and what the students know, understand and are able to do as a result of studying that subject.” Birtwistle emphasized, too, that tuning is a faculty-led process.
Speakers during Friday’s session noted the difficulty of defining an American baccalaureate degree without using the words “credits” or “hours.” “What do we mean as a country by what a degree represents and what the learning is that’s behind a degree?
Why [this discussion] is significant in an American context is it redefines what we mean by quality,” she said. “And quality is student learning. Quality in our current framework is based on institutional reputation and student inputs,” i.e. the scores and backgrounds that students bring into college, rather than those they leave with. “We can’t get to the 60 percent degree attainment that we need without really focusing on quality,” she said, in reference to Lumina’s objective of improving college access. McKiernan acknowledged, however, the challenges in developing common degree frameworks in the United States, where top-down attempts at reform are suspect.And now, for the rest of the story...
The new issue of Bringing Theory to Practice is now available.
Assess this! is a gathering place for information and resources about new and better ways to promote learning in higher education, with a special focus on high-impact educational practices, student engagement, general or liberal education, and assessment of learning. The blog's name comes from one of the major activities in the ongoing cycle that starts with establishing student learning outcomes and proceeds through designing learning opportunities, assessing their effectiveness, and using assessment results to make improvements in educational practices.
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