| An Opportunity To Participate The Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) is an innovative approach to assessing your institution’s contribution to student learning developed by CAE with the RAND Corporation. Our measures are designed to simulate complex, ambiguous situations that every successful college graduate may one day face. Life is not like a multiple choice test, with four or five simple choices for every problem. So we ask students to analyze complex material and provide written responses. The CLA measures are uniquely designed to test for reasoning and communications skills that most agree should be one outcome of a college education. Most CLA participants assess their institution cross-sectionally, testing a sample of first year students in the fall and a sample of seniors in the spring. You receive two reports, the first after fall testing that looks at how your entering class compares to other CLA participants (adjusted for SAT or ACT scores). Then after testing of seniors in the spring, you receive a full Institutional Report that evaluates your school's value-added on a comparative basis. Testing every year allows you to measure for effects of changes in curriculum or pedagogy. For additional information about the assessment, please review the CLA Brochure. We also encourage you to review an Annotated Sample Institutional Report, which presents excerpts of a sample institutional report and accompanying explanations. If you’d like to review a list of institutions that are currently participating in the assessment, please click here. Finally, we welcome your visit to www.claintheclassroom.org, where you can learn more about the latest initiative of the CLA. Whereas participation in the institutional CLA provides a campus with information about the overall performance of students at a college or university, CLA in the Classroom allows a campus to begin to dig deeper and better understand its overall results. For CLA pricing information, please contact Chris Jackson by calling 212.217.0845 or emailing cjackson@cae.org Institutions investigating participation in the Voluntary System of Accountability (VSA) are encouraged to download the CLA VSA Fact Sheet. To sign up for the next academic year or be placed on our mailing list, contact CLA. Or sign up for a free web conference to learn more. |
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| About Collegiate Learning Assessment The CLA begins with conceptions of collegiate quality that are based on improvements in student learning, with three key elements serving as the project’s foundation: the institution, value added, and campus comparisons. Institution The CLA uses the institution (rather than the individual student) as the primary unit of analysis. This means that the focus is on how the institution as a whole contributes to student development. Therefore, the CLA does not present another high-stakes test for individual students, but rather it aggregates the information to better understand the institution’s role in promoting learning. Value Added The CLA focuses on the value added provided by colleges and universities. When institutional quality is based solely on the students’ scores on entrance examinations, there is no way to know what was learned after they matriculated; again, when student ability is only measured upon graduation, there is no way to determine the students’ relative growth without knowing their starting point. It is only by comparing what students know when they start college with what they know when they finish that it is possible to assess the learning that actually occurred while in college. Comparisons This approach also allows for inter-institutional comparisons of overall value added. CLA results can be combined with institutional data to determine factors that promote student learning and growth. |
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About the CLA Measures The CLA focuses on a set of common areas that comprise what is central to most notions of collegiate education. These areas are: |
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| • critical thinking • analytic reasoning • written communication • problem solving | ||||||||||||
| The CLA combines two types of testing instruments: Performance Tasks Students must complete a “real-life” activity (such as preparing a memo or policy recommendation) by using a series of documents that must be reviewed and evaluated. Completion of these instruments does not require the recall of particular facts or formulas; instead, the measures assess the demonstrated ability to interpret, analyze and synthesize information. Analytic Writing Tasks Evaluate students’ ability to articulate complex ideas, examine claims and evidence, support ideas with relevant reasons and examples, sustain a coherent discussion, and use standard written English. |
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