Summer 2005
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Summer 2005 |
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The meeting was cosponsored by CIC and the Council for Aid to Education (CAE), the organization that designed the instrument. The CLA is a new assessment tool—one of the first of its kind—that measures the cognitive growth of students and attempts to define the “value-added” contributed by the institution to student learning. Consortium members have committed to administer the CLA to groups of freshmen and seniors during the next three academic years, and will meet annually to discuss results and share best practices. During the opening presentation, Richard Hersh, senior fellow at CAE, stressed that “the accountability movement is upon us because the importance of higher education is much greater today…. Assessment is a way of teaching and learning…and the CLA—which allows comparisons across institutions—empowers colleges to be more efficacious and successful in getting students to learn what we value. It’s a powerful institutional change tool.” Marc Chun, research scientist at CAE, led participants through the basic design of the CLA, and gave them the opportunity to navigate the instrument using laptop computers. Participants also met in small groups to discuss issues of curriculum design, faculty cooperation, and student recruitment.
Using the CLA for accountability and improvement was the topic of a presentation by Margaret Miller, Director of the Center for the Study of Higher Education at the Curry School of Education, University of Virginia, editor of Change magazine, and Director of the Pew-sponsored National Forum on College-Level Learning. Miller noted that the CLA is “the first viable attempt to bring accountability and improvement together” in an assessment approach. She also recommended linking CLA results with other campus assessment data, including graduate admission and licensure exams, and surveys of student experience, such as the CIRP Freshman Survey and the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). A panel of participants from institutions already administering the CLA shared some of their successful strategies for administering it. Joel Frederickson, professor and assistant dean for assessment, Bethel University (MN); Paul Presson, associate provost for assessment, Westminster College (UT); and Marian Sherwood, director of institutional research at Allegheny College (PA) stressed the importance of securing student and faculty involvement in order to establish integrity and gain momentum. The CLA will be administered at 35 participating institutions beginning this fall; a second Consortium meeting will be held next summer. The CIC/CLA Consortium is supported by grants from the Teagle Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
Independent |
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CIC Director of
Research Hal Hartley (left), works with K.D. Godwin of Voorhees
College (SC) and Deborah Hanson, University
of Great Falls (MT) as they navigate through the
CLA instrument.