The right way to measure college learning

National standardized testing won't work.

By Catharine Hoffman Beyer

from the April 9, 2007 edition

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SEATTLE - How do we know what college students really learn? A commission on higher education headed by US Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings has raised the issue of whether national standardized tests, such as the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), can answer that question. Our research suggests they can't.

The University of Washington's Study of Undergraduate Learning (UW SOUL) and the book about the study, "Inside the Undergraduate Experience," provide evidence that national exams will not be able to measure college learning. What they show is that studies that track the same students over time, departmental assessment of learning in the major, and student self-assessment are better measures.

UW began its study in 1999 with 304 students. During the next four years, we investigated what undergraduates learned, where they learned it, and how we might improve their experience. We used interviews, focus groups, surveys, e-mail, and portfolios to track their learning.

A few details about the paths of two study participants illustrate what standardized testing would miss.

"Joe" came to UW having taken college courses in high school. He was questioning a future in aerospace engineering after a trip to a regional Shakespeare festival convinced him there were pleasures in life he had missed. In his first month at UW, he wrote: "I consider my time here ... my one big chance in life to really learn something. This is the main reasoning behind my wanting to come to this university and embrace a broader range of studies.... I am very uncertain of what I want to do with my life, but I think that my time here ... will help me grow into the person I want to be."

In the course of four years, Joe explored a number of fields, including astronomy, finally settling on anthropology and the comparative history of ideas as majors. He joined an archaeological dig; learned to write poetry; studied Percy Bysshe Shelley, Jack Kerouac, differential equations, and retaliatory violence; and tutored high school kids in math. He worked hard to pay his way through school. Joe wrote arguments for his anthropology major on the "Eve" model of human ancestry and on seasonal transhumance in the late Stone Age. After he graduated, Joe overcame his fear of travel and went to Japan and China where he learned Chinese and wrote beautiful e-mails about his life there.

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