A Measure of Learning Is Put to the Test - Faculty - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 1 views
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Others say those who take the test have little motivation to do well, which makes it tough to draw conclusions from their performance.
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"Everything that No Child Left Behind signified during the Bush administration—we operate 180 degrees away from that," says Roger Benjamin, president of the Council for Aid to Education, which developed and promotes the CLA. "We don't want this to be a high-stakes test. We're putting a stake in the ground on classic liberal-arts issues. I'm willing to rest my oar there. These core abilities, these higher-order skills, are very important, and they're even more important in a knowledge economy where everyone needs to deal with a surplus of information." Only an essay test, like the CLA, he says, can really get at those skills.
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"The CLA is really an authentic assessment process," says Pedro Reyes, associate vice chancellor for academic planning and assessment at the University of Texas system.
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"The Board of Regents here saw that it would be an important test because it measures analytical ability, problem-solving ability, critical thinking, and communication. Those are the skills that you want every undergraduate to walk away with." (Other large systems that have embraced the CLA include California State University and the West Virginia system.)
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We began by administering a retired CLA question, a task that had to do with analyzing crime-reduction strategies,
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Mr. Ernsting and Ms. McConnell are perfectly sincere about using CLA-style tasks to improve instruction on their campuses. But at the same time, colleges have a less high-minded motive for familiarizing students with the CLA style: It just might improve their scores when it comes time to take the actual test.
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by 2012, the CLA scores of more than 100 colleges will be posted, for all the world to see, on the "College Portrait" Web site of the Voluntary System of Accountability, an effort by more than 300 public colleges and universities to provide information about life and learning on their campuses.
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If familiarizing students with CLA-style tasks does raise their scores, then the CLA might not be a pure, unmediated reflection of the full range of liberal-arts skills. How exactly should the public interpret the scores of colleges that do not use such training exercises?
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Trudy W. Banta, a professor of higher education and senior adviser to the chancellor for academic planning and evaluation at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis, believes it is a serious mistake to publicly release and compare scores on the test. There is too much risk, she says, that policy makers and the public will misinterpret the numbers.
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most colleges do not use a true longitudinal model: That is, the students who take the CLA in their first year do not take it again in their senior year. The test's value-added model is therefore based on a potentially apples-and-oranges comparison.
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freshman test-takers' scores are assessed relative to their SAT and ACT scores, and so are senior test-takers' scores. For that reason, colleges cannot game the test by recruiting an academically weak pool of freshmen and a strong pool of seniors.
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seniors, who are typically recruited to take the CLA toward the end of their final semester, when they can already taste the graduation champagne.
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Of the few dozen universities that had already chosen to publish CLA data on that site, roughly a quarter of the reports appeared to include erroneous descriptions of the year-to-year value-added scores.
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Students' CLA scores improved if they took courses that required a substantial amount of reading and writing. Many students didn't take such courses, and their CLA scores tended to stay flat.
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Colleges that make demands on students can actually develop their skills on the kinds of things measured by the CLA.
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Mr. Shavelson believes the CLA's essays and "performance tasks" offer an unusually sophisticated way of measuring what colleges do, without relying too heavily on factual knowledge from any one academic field.
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Politicians and consumers want easily interpretable scores, while colleges need subtler and more detailed data to make internal improvements.
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Since its debut a decade ago, it has been widely praised as a sophisticated alternative to multiple-choice tests