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June 9, 2008
It's the Students, not the Statistics
By Bob Connor, The Teagle Foundation
There’s a problematic article in the Chronicle of Higher Education for June 6, 2008, “Test Touted as 2 Studies Question Its Value.” The article vacillates between reporting the work that the Council of Independent Colleges has done to improve student learning through the use of the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), and discussing an attack on the statistical validity of that instrument by Gary N. Larson, a dean at Wheaton College in Illinois. Since the Teagle Foundation has been one of the funders of CIC’s work, I was naturally interested in the critique.
Statistically minded friends tell me that Dean Larson’s critique is flawed, but I’ll leave that to the statisticians. What amazed me was the assumption that the purpose of CLA was to provide a ranking of colleges:
“The reason that the CLA has gotten so much buzz is that it in theory is something that you could use at Harvard and you could use at the College of Du Page," Mr. Larson said, citing the community college just outside Chicago, "and you could in fact control for enough factors to say, all things being as equal as they could ever be, Harvard is or isn't doing a better job of educating students than the College of Du Page.”
The last thing we need in higher education is yet another ranking system and fortunately that is not the way the CIC colleges are using the instrument. They typically combine it with a lot of other evidence to get a better picture of how their students measure up in critical thinking, analytical reasoning, and writing. The goal is improving student learning not getting ahead in some statistical rat race.
Late in the article that point begins to emerge:
Despite disagreeing with the council over the reliability of the testing methodology, researchers such as Mr. Larson find value in the CLA, especially insofar as it can help an institution improve its instruction.
Can CLA in combination with other assessment activities really do that? A report just issued by the Council of Independent Colleges, “Evidence of Learning: Applying the Collegiate Learning Assessment to Improve Teaching and Learning in the Liberal Arts College Experience” answers that question persuasively. It can and it does. The stories of how these colleges have put CLA to work shows how other colleges can benefit from more systematic ways of assessing student learning. There are lots of ways to do that. CLA is just one of them, but used properly it should be of interest to any institution, Du Page or Harvard, that is serious about improving student learning. It’s about students, not rankings or statistical sophistication.
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