Carnegie
Corporation
of New York
Fall 2007
A key outcome of the Collegiate Learning Assessment administration, Sotherland
says, is that “Everything [learned] was shared between the three
colleges. We built a lot of trust and often shared information not shared
even within a college.” For all of us, he explains, the focus was
on “friend raising.” The three colleges’ respective
presidents, he reports, “marveled at how healthy these exchanges
were.” Initial faculty resistance to the Collegiate Learning Assessment
was countered by asking tough questions such as, “What are we accomplishing—and
how do we know we are?” A longitudinal study will prove the best
measure of value added, Sotherland expects, and will confirm whether a
cross-sectional study provides a reliable “snapshot.”
“By probing institutions from several different directions, using different instruments, and taking a healthy inquiry-based approach,” Sotherland says, “we can get a better picture of what’s happening.” Such a process of self-examination inevitably helps the institution—faculty and administrators—to examine what it will take to improve teaching and learning in the classroom.
Teagle President Connor offers this observation: “The statistical best is sometimes the enemy of pragmatic improvement in this work.” He clarifies: “I mean, the benefit of the Collegiate Learning Assessment is often that it raises important questions, not that it provides definitive answers. Kalamazoo College is a good example. A purist in statistics might object that the numbers were too small to draw attention to important issues that might otherwise have remained on the back burner.” However, he says, “Once they got pushed up front [by Collegiate Learning Assessment results], other evidence came into play, and improvements could be made.”
The Council of Independent Colleges, in cooperation with the
Council for Aid to Education and with support from the Teagle Foundation
and Carnegie Corporation of New York, decided it was time to participate
in the growing “culture of evidence,” and chose to do so by
making use of the consortium model. According to Council of Independent
Colleges president Richard Ekman, “Five years ago, we had this
hunch that small liberal arts colleges needed to use quantitative measures
to talk about benefits.” In an increasingly competitive college
admissions marketplace, he says, it “became important for small
independent colleges to show that they are doing something worthwhile.”
Later, Ekman explains, as colleges began hearing “nasty, threatening
language from the feds,” the incentive to follow through on this
hunch became stronger.
In 2004-05, a total of 12 Council of Independent Colleges member institutions participated in the Collegiate Learning Assessment consortium, and 32 institutions, including 6 of the original 12, will participate in the second phase of the three-year consortium project. Members of the consortium meet annually to discuss and evaluate what they have learned. At the first annual meet meeting, score reports were distributed in advance, as they will be at subsequent annual meetings. Deans and administrators responsible for assessment and institutional data and some faculty attended the meeting. The presence of faculty will be required at subsequent annual meetings, says Ekman. “The challenge,” he says, “is that faculty are trained to teach their disciplines and not these higher order skills.” Richard Hersh believes that the problem is even more fundamental. “The presumption is, if you know it you can teach it,” he says, but in most cases, “Professors know nothing about teaching other than by accident.” Teacher training for college faculty has not been a priority at most institutions of higher education. This appears to be changing among members of the Council of Independent Colleges collaborative. In the summer of 2007, Ekman reports, a corps leadership will provide training to enable faculty to “develop some parallel assessments in their classes, followed by Web conferences, and sharing information at different levels.”