Roger Benjamin, president of RAND’s Council for Aid to Education, demonstrates the utility of including direct, cognitive measures rather than proxies to benchmark student learning progress, in his session “A New Field of Dreams: The College Learning Assessment Project (CLA).”

Results from a feasibility study of the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) project by the RAND Corporation’s Council for Aid to Education (CAE), unveiled during an Institute session, showed that the CLA is a viable and useful assessment approach for colleges and universities. The CLA assesses and helps institutions to demonstrate the “value added” contributions to student learning through the liberal arts. Roger Benjamin, president of RAND’s CAE, reviewed the purpose, methods, initial results, and future plans of the project, which include offering the CLA instruments to higher education institutions nationwide.
     The feasibility study conducted in 2002 with more than 1,300 students at 14 colleges and universities across the country assessed student-learning growth from the freshman year to the senior year in critical thinking skills in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences. Benjamin said the study showed that “upperclass students (juniors and seniors) tended to earn higher scores on our measures than did underclass students—showing higher levels of cognitive complexity. This suggests that the measures capture institutional effects (recognizing that learning occurs both in and out of the classroom). The correlation between years in school and test scores was statistically significant. A school’s average score on the CLA measures also correlated highly with the school’s SAT score, yet we found statistically significant institutional effects after controlling on SAT,” he noted. “The measures showed a high degree of reliability and validity in scores and correlations, which encourages me to say we have a sound instrument to offer colleges.”
     In explaining the process, Benjamin said “the CLA uses direct measures of student learning rather than proxies for it…. It focuses not on discipline- specific content but, instead, on general education skills—critical thinking, analytic reasoning, and written communication. The measures are all open-ended rather than multiple-choice…and use a ‘matrix-sampling’ approach to assessment, which involves administering separate components of the full set to different (but randomly selected) sub-samples of students, thereby minimizing the time required per student yet still allowing complete coverage of the range of instruments and content areas.” In addition, the project measures the institutional contribution to student learning by “measuring how well an institution’s students perform relative to similarly situated students, and by measuring how much students’ skills improve during their tenure at the institution through a pre-test/post-test model,” he said.
     In offering this approach to colleges and universities beginning in 2003-04, Benjamin noted that “the assessment can be done in a cost-effective manner and within a relatively short time frame. In the future, we plan to administer the measures over the Internet, which will substantially reduce costs and increase the number of institutions that can participate in the assessment activities.” Institutions interested in participating should contact Roger Benjamin at (212) 661-5800.

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Last updated: December 2003
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