The Teagle Foundation awarded a three-year, $300,000 grant to CIC in November to support the Council’s work with the RAND/Council for Aid to Education’s “Collegiate Learning Assessment” (CLA) project. The CLA assesses—and helps institutions to demonstrate—the “value added” to student learning through the liberal arts. CIC will work with a consortium of colleges and universities that have decided to utilize the CLA as a means of learning more about the cognitive growth of students between the freshman and senior years.
      “This group of colleges is in the vanguard of an important movement. It is our hope that their willingness to be pioneers in using CLA will be rewarded through the recognition and assistance they receive as members of the consortium,” said CIC President Richard Ekman in announcing the grant. “It’s important to note that the goal of the grant project is not to measure changes in individual students, but rather to learn more about programmatic features at particular colleges and universities that correlate with ‘institutional effects’ associated with large gains in cognitive growth. We hope to find ways for a wide range of institutions to learn from the pilot group about innovations worth adopting,” Ekman said.
      CIC will organize summer meetings for participating colleges and will provide on-campus assistance to these colleges—and to others that the Teagle Foundation expects to fund directly over the next few months—for assessment activities. CIC expects to work closely with RAND/CAE in all aspects of the project.
      RAND/CAE conducted a feasibility study of the CLA in 2002 with more than 1,300 students at 14 colleges and universities across the country. The study assessed growth in student learning from the freshman to the senior year in critical thinking, analytical reasoning, and written communication skills in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences.
      Roger Benjamin, president of RAND/CAE, presented findings of the feasibility study at CIC’s 2003 Institute for Chief Academic Officers in Savannah. He said “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.” (Click here to view more information on Benjamin’s presentation last year.)