Benefits & Uses of CLA Supporting curricular, instructional, and programmatic reform The CLA promotes the continuous improvement of curricula, pedagogy, admissions, certification, and retention within an institution. If assessment shows large numbers of students aggregated by type of instruction, gender, race/ethnicity or social economic status, or other criteria not performing as well as expected, there will be a faculty and institutional responsibility to investigate the reasons for this and, where appropriate, to make changes in courses, programs, and teaching. Moreover, the development of effective measures of the value added to student performance would create an additional source of data on teaching effectiveness that goes beyond current student evaluations of courses. Perhaps the most vexing problem facing faculties periodically is the realization that their balkanized academic programs do not translate into an institution-wide curriculum that produces a common or liberal education of a sufficient quality and distinctiveness that they would desire. Yet the attempts of curriculum reform committees typically result in modest, incremental changes at best. The immediate reason for this is the combination of department-based governance and the assumption of the parity of all fields of knowledge. Lofty attempts to introduce capstone courses therefore run up against the desire of individual faculty in departments to teach their specialized subjects only. Yet if one agrees that performance-based measures do in fact assess attributes that faculty, administrators, parents, employers and students agree are critical skills that graduating seniors should possess, two points follow. First, if faculty find that the results of administration of performance-based measures at their institution are unsatisfactory (i.e., their students do not do well) they will be motivated to develop courses that contribute to the improvement of their students on subsequent performance-based measures. The courses will most likely not be the specialized courses currently in place, but rather will emphasize the development of critical reasoning skills in the above mentioned academic clusters, focusing on the ability to synthesize information and make judgments in applying that information. Second, as faculty at an institution eventually develop a critical mass of performance measures in these academic clusters, they will increasingly judge the suitability of all undergraduate courses by the extent to which they contribute to improving their students' performance-based reasoning skills. For the first time, therefore, one would have institution-wide criteria for course adoption. This would be a positive step in improving undergraduate education. The benchmarking results, coupled with the necessary clarification of institutional expectations for students, can also provide clearer signals to the K-12 system. Seventy percent of high school graduates move on to some form of higher education. The creation of a K-16 system requires that more attention be paid to both the criteria for higher education admissions and graduation. Much has been written recently about the "wasted" senior year of high school and the complaint that too many students come to colleges and universities under-prepared for college-level work. The value added approach to direct assessment of student learning (controlling for the resources the student brings to higher education) requires benchmarking specification of student performance thus setting the stage for linking high school graduation requirements to college entrance and exit standards that could then be monitored over time. States with strong and sophisticated K-12 testing regimes, such as Massachusetts and Connecticut, are now in a good position to articulate such standards as a K-16 system.
One of the most difficult issues facing higher education leaders is the productivity or cost disease problem. Given the return to financial stringency in higher education institutions occasioned by the budget crises of the states, calls to improve productivity or cut costs are again rising out of state capitals, and private institutions face reduced payouts from reduced endowments due to the stock market decline. The problem is that recent efforts to reduce costs in non academic units of the university may have run their course. The academic budget, which represents 90% of the budget of most institutions, is the only place to go to significantly reduce budgets. And here is where it becomes difficult. This is so because there are few agreed upon metrics against which to evaluate programs. The cost of academic programs, themselves, is problematic because many such programs are also integral to the mission of the institution. For example, many science departments have expensive laboratory programs. But can one do without physics or chemistry? There are other useful comparative evaluation metrics such as student demand. However, the most important one to tackle, the quality of academic programs, is also surely the most difficult. Without a solid metric to evaluate the quality of academic programs, it is difficult to see how much progress can be made in helping administrators and faculty senates move resources from academic programs of low priority to those of high priority. Performance-based measures offer such a possibility. Consider the value added assessment concept. Presidents and their boards of trustees will now be in a position to more accurately assess the vital signs of their institution's contribution to their students' learning. In examining the results of administration of performance measures at their institution, they will be able to assess the relative strengths and weaknesses of their academic programs' contribution to growth in student learning. Armed with such an academic audit, the leaders of the institution will thus be in a position to make strategic academic investments to improve the areas deemed to be deficit in producing acceptable learning outcomes. If budget cuts are required to reduce resource allocations to some academic programs in order to invest in the academic areas of high priority, the leaders of the institution will have a more useful criterion by which to make such decisions. Moreover, when faced with the necessity of budget cuts, the leaders will have a stronger metric to use in making such decisions so as to protect the institution's ability to achieve agreed upon student learning goals. Thus, the current comparative evaluation criteria - centrality, student demand, cost, and comparative advantage would be joined by another criterion, quality of undergraduate learning, to use. The importance of adding performance measures can not be over stated. It is not realistic to ask faculty and administrators to judge proposed productivity changes in the absence of an acceptable metric that benchmarks their proposed benefits over costs. Impact on student learning outcomes is that metric. No longer, therefore, should institutional leaders engage in across the board cuts or across the board increases in budget for their academic units. They may apply the above criteria and reallocate resources from programs of low priority to those of high priority defined in terms of how they will improve student learning. Moreover, in the absence of an assessment system that benchmarks the progress an institution makes in improving the progress of the students at their institution in learning, faculty and administrators are reduced to rely on actuarial and (especially) research productivity measures. This creates a false, Potempkin village in which virtually all institutions, whether they are only focused on undergraduate education or not, create the impression that their faculty are contributing to the frontiers of knowledge development. The Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) Project encourages faculty and administrators at, for example, community colleges to select goals for value added growth after they benchmark the initial student learning level. In this way they can develop goals that are equal to or superior to the student learning goals selected at prestigious institutions that admit students with high SAT scores but then find it difficult to move the performance levels of their students very far.
In addition to the benefits the research could bring to campus-based improvement efforts, the CLA could also assist those responsible for developing state-based policies that will support higher education reforms. Governors and legislators set goals for their higher education sector based on their perceptions of their workforce needs, social-economic inequality problems, enrollment pressures, and budgetary constraints. State policies intended to ensure quality, productivity, and accountability would be enhanced if informed by a common metric that accurately benchmarks student learning progress. The focus on the state's role in public policy in higher education, however, is only one-half of the equation; a focus on public and private higher education institutions is the other half. We must connect these halves by linking state policy in higher education to the institutions that, in the end, carry out such policies. Unless we develop a research and policy design logic that combines both institutional and state levels of analysis, it is highly unlikely that the goals of state-level policymakers and analysts will be achieved. The concern for accountability, most often associated with state demands on public colleges and universities, can unintentionally promote bad educational policy. For example, state funding is often predicated on full-time student equivalents (FTE). This body-count mentality focuses issues like retention more on maintaining enrollment than on educational quality or student learning. In addition, policies to provide smaller classes, technology for teaching, or more effective advising, for example, might better be judged by their direct impact on students. The problem is that each educational policy issue, such as access, retention, true costs of instruction, and quality - whether debated inside or outside the academy - is too often treated in isolation. As noted above, the benefits of cost reduction ideas need to be evaluated against an appropriate benchmark: the logical candidate is the quality of student learning outcomes. And while the public discourse in higher education is understandably focused on improving access, it surely is critically important to ask the question access to what kind and level of quality of undergraduate education?
Until we have stronger measures of progress made in increasing learning outcomes for minority students, comparing them over time and with their majority student counterparts, it remains difficult to mount a more focused and sustained program to remedy the deficits. The CLA would promote greater admissions, retention and graduation rates for minorities.
Since The Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) measures have the added property of allowing inter institutional comparisons, faculty and administrators will be able, for the first time, to benchmark the progress they are making with other institutions they believe are comparable to their own! |