Carnegie
Corporation
of New York
Fall 2007
The University of Charleston in West Virginia is a member of the Council of Independent Colleges Collegiate Learning Assessment Consortium. A small liberal arts institution with an enrollment of fewer than 1,500 students, the University of Charleston has been cultivating a “culture of assessment” for the past decade in which strong emphasis is placed on student learning. “Students know when they enroll,” says Ekman, that they will participate in assessment [activities],” and faculty play a central role in shaping and evaluating these activities. Notably, according to Ekman, in 2005-06, the University of Charleston had “the highest value added score of any Collegiate Learning Assessment user in the country.” The campus culture is such that “a day of assessment” is celebrated during which the public is invited to see and hear a wide range of performance-based learning outcomes. A valuable message of this exercise, according to Ekman, is that “students learn that performance is important—and often public.”
Well before the report of the Commission on Higher Education was issued, Ekman explains, members of the Council of Independent Colleges Collegiate Learning Assessment Consortium were deeply committed to improving student learning on campus. He believes strongly that the voluntary use of the Collegiate Learning Assessment, in tandem with other assessments, will obviate the need for state or federal government involvement. In such a culture of evidence, says Ekman, the historical ranking of colleges by reputation will inevitably be replaced with a ranking by performance.
In the autumn of 2006, Harvard University, resting securely at the pinnacle of America’s pyramid of selective colleges, nonetheless signed on to administer the Collegiate Learning Assessment to 315 of its freshmen students; a similar number of seniors took the test in the spring of 2007. Derek Bok, until recently Harvard's interim president and president of Harvard from 1971 to 1991, is the author of Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More. Bok’s answer to the question “Are our college students learning?” appears to be “not nearly enough.” According to Andrew Delbanco, professor of humanities and director of the American Studies Program at Columbia University, “Bok paints a picture of colleges that, if not dysfunctional, are operating far below capacity. He questions the coherence and purpose of departmental majors…criticizes lecturers for their indifference to whether students learn anything, and, in general, holds faculty accountable for ignoring research about which teaching methods are most effective.”14 Contrary to the Harvard professor who expressed the belief that Harvard students are so bright they require little teaching, Bok offers a decidedly different point of view. Acknowledging that the U.S. Department of Education would like Harvard’s use of the Collegiate Learning Assessment to serve as an accountability tool for parents and students, Harvard’s reason, says Bok, is “to use it as a formative exercise to help us improve [instruction].”15
14 Andrew Delbanco, “Scandals
of Higher Education,” The New York Review of Books, March 29, 2007,
p. 46.
15 Linda K. Wertheiner, op. cit.