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To improve how student learning is measured, Lumina will seek to support and advance tools, tactics, and systems that effectively define and measure both generalizable skills, like abstract reasoning and critical thinking, and subject-specific skills that students learn. The nation should also learn from measurement tools now in use, like the Collegiate Learning Assessment and the Voluntary System of Accountability, Mr. Merisotis says.

Today, Shavelson, Klein & Benjamin published an online article on Inside Higher Ed entitled, "The Limitations of Portfolios." The comments to that article are even more illuminating, and highlight the debate about electronic portfolios vs. accountability systems... assessment vs. evaluation. These arguments highlight what I think is a clash in philosophies of learning and assessment, between traditional, behaviorist models and more progressive, cognitive/constructivist models. How do we build assessment strategies that bridge these two approaches? Or is the divide too wide? Do these different perspectives support the need for multiple measures and triangulation?

Electronic portfolios can follow a student beyond graduation into careers and other life pursuits-- but not if the university can't guarantee access, or if the data won't transfer from one system to another. A look at how ePortfolios can be true repositories of lifelong learning.

In the absence of detailed guidance, the panel defined sizable and sustained effects through case discussion

The Top Tier initiative's choice of broad topics (such as early childhood interventions), emphasis on long-term effects, and use of narrow evidence criteria combine to provide limited information on what is effective in achieving specific outcomes.

Several rigorous alternatives to randomized experiments are considered appropriate for other situations: quasi-experimental comparison group studies, statistical analyses of observational data, and--in some circumstances--in-depth case studies. The credibility of their estimates of program effects relies on how well the studies' designs rule out competing causal explanations.

data on how high-school students’ awareness and opinions of colleges change over time

A major finding was that big-name colleges lose “market share” as students progress through high school. During that time, students become more aware of lesser-known institutions—and find them more desirable.

he data. “It reveals the fluidity of decision making among students,” he said. “Some places have more ability to influence student choices later in the process.”

The university's president, Robert W. Mendenhall, was cited for creating "a compelling example of how technology and a competency-based academic model -- where students earn degrees by demonstrating what they know and can do -- can expand access to higher education."

At this point in the openness conversation, the example you hear over and over is a little-known university in Utah that took the old model, and, in the words of its president, "blew that up." That is Western Governors University—a nonprofit, accredited online institution that typically charges $2,890 per six-month term—where students advance by showing what they've learned, not how much time they've spent in class. It's called competency-based education. It means you can fast-forward your degree by testing out of stuff you've already mastered. Some see a marriage of open content and competency-based learning as a model for the small-pieces-loosely-joined chain of cheaper, fragmented education. "We view the role of the university of the future as measuring and credentialing learning, not the source of all learning," says Robert W. Mendenhall, the president.

Colleges and universities have plenty of tools, but they must learn to use them more effectively. That is how George D. Kuh describes the state of assessing what college students learn.