In July 2006, CIC’s Collegiate Learning Assessment Consortium gathered for its second annual meeting in Washington, DC. Campus teams from 31 institutions were present along with resource persons and staff members from CIC and the Council for Aid to Education (CAE), the Consortium’s sponsors.

The Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) is one of the first assessment tools to provide direct evidence of student learning occurring over a typical four-year college program. The CLA provides a “value added” scoring of the institution’s unique contribution to the intellectual growth of students on aspects of cognitive development that are especially important in the liberal arts: critical thinking, analytic reasoning, problem solving, and written communication.

The principal focus of the 2006 CIC/CLA Consortium meeting was to interpret the CLA scores for each institution. Campus teams attending the Consortium meeting were assisted in understanding their campus reports, and worked collaboratively in developing strategies to share their scores with key constituencies on campus.

An institutional score report informs a college or university as to whether it is performing at, above, or below expected levels, given the entry characteristics of its students. Furthermore, because scores are standardized, the CLA can be a useful benchmarking tool to assess progress on student learning relative to the intellectual growth of students at other institutions. It is possible, for example, for a college with entering students who scored lower on the SAT to outperform more selective institutions if the students at the less-selective college demonstrate greater gains on the CLA measures.

Stephen Klein, recently retired senior research scientist at RAND Education, who is the principal psychometrician for the CLA, clarified what the CLA can and cannot measure. He also reminded participants that the CLA is fundamentally different from government-mandated testing under the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. All of the CLA measures are open-ended, instead of being multiple choice. The institution, not the student, is what is being measured with the CLA. And, unlike NCLB-mandated testing, there is no fixed standard of proficiency with the CLA; progress is relative, depending on the characteristics of the students enrolled at the institution.

Peter Ewell, vice president of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems and a nationally recognized expert on assessment, worked with Consortium members to link the various assessment data that are available to them and use holistic assessment to effect campus change. He reminded the meeting participants of the importance of engaging other campus constituents—faculty members, key administrators, and others—in the consideration of the CLA results. “The conversation,” Ewell said, “is as important as what the numbers say.”

The Teagle Foundation’s president, W. Robert Connor, addressed the group on the importance of assessment. The Teagle Foundation is generously supporting a number of liberal arts assessment initiatives, including the CIC/CLA Consortium. Connor noted that the Teagle mantra on assessment is, “If you know more about how your students are learning, you can teach better and they can learn better.”

The Council for Aid to Education was represented at the meeting by Roger Benjamin, president; Richard Hersh, senior fellow; Marc Chun, research scientist; and project managers Esther Hong, Alex Nemeth, and James Padilla. CIC staff members participating in the meeting were Richard Ekman, president; Russell Garth, executive vice president; Hal Hartley, director of research; and Stephen Gibson, director of projects.