CIC recently announced a new opportunity to assist member colleges and universities in the assessment of student learning on campus. Thanks to a generous grant of $545,714 from the Teagle Foundation, this initiative will enable faculty members and others to make greater use of assessment to improve teaching and learning. Although smaller, private colleges and universities are already among the leaders in the voluntary use of assessment of student learning, this new effort seeks to improve teaching and learning by developing best practices that can be readily shared among CIC colleges and universities.

The key to this initiative is the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), one of the first testing instruments that measures student learning directly. The CLA captures the
“value-added” contribution of the institution to student learning in such areas as critical thinking, analytic reasoning, and written communication. Over the past five years, CIC has collaborated with the Council for Aid to Education (CAE), the developer of the CLA instrument, first in a pilot project that included independent colleges and universities, then during the early years of public participation in the CLA, and more recently in a 33-institution consortium of CIC institutions. The consortium participants are now in the second year of their three-year project.

Building on the successes of the current CIC/CLA Consortium, this new phase of CIC’s assessment activities will help both continuing and new Consortium members pioneer more nuanced approaches to outcomes assessment. Institutions interested in participating in the next round of the CIC/CLA Consortium will be asked to propose comprehensive assessment plans for improving teaching and learning on their own campuses. For example, some institutions may choose to sample additional students with the CLA for comparisons between specific groups of students. Others might link the CLA to other assessment initiatives, such as the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), campus-based learning portfolios, or classroom measures.

Institutions selected for this new phase will be asked to make a three-year commitment to use the CLA in conjunction with other assessment strategies of their own choosing, designate three-person teams to guide the institutional assessment efforts, agree to share assessment data with other Consortium members and collaborate on developing successful approaches to using the data, and participate in annual summer conferences with other Consortium members. In return, participating institutions will receive a special reduced fee for the CLA, have most of their costs of participation in the summer conferences covered by CIC, and benefit from additional resources and support provided by CIC and CAE.

More detailed information about the opportunity to participate in the CIC/CLA Consortium will be available in August 2007. Institutions that wish to join the Consortium in its next phase will be able to apply formally in September 2007, with notification of acceptance in early October. Selected institutions will start right away to develop assessment plans that will include administering the CLA in the fall of 2008, and working with other Consortium members through 2010–2011.

For additional information about the next phase of CIC’s work with the CLA, contact CIC Director of Research Hal Hartley at hhartley@cic.nche.edu or (202) 466-7230.