SLOs

California's community college educators are late to embrace the system of Student Learning Outcomes, or "SLOs," as a means of tracking program effectiveness, but pressure from regional accreditation bodies has spurred a shotgun marriage. Here's the way it works: Colleges establish a small set of high level SLOs around a handful of "big themes," such as communication skills, critical thinking, and citizenship. Then every college department creates its own collection of SLOs, which are supposed to be aligned with the "big themes," but that go into a bit more detail for each discipline. Finally, instructors create their own specific SLOs for each course. I will collect resources that I find relating to SLOs in this blog from time to time, beginning with this Web site from Sacramento City College. After setting the SLOs, instructors and department heads need to develop an assessment system for tracking progress in achieving the outcomes. These assessments range from student self-report surveys on how proficient they feel in some core skills to faculty ratings of selected student work at the beginning and end of each course using a rubric with several core skills.

More on College-Level Assessments of Critical Thinking

Once again, my workload is interfering with my blogging, but I came across a 2007 article that resonates with my interests in higher education assessment. This report by Richard Fliegel and John Holland at the University of Southern California describes one university's approach to assessing students' development of critical thinking through college. The authors question the value of large-scale measurement instruments and intend their instrument for local use by faculty within their own university. They also provide a useful, if brief, overview of the many different critical thinking assessment instruments out there. These efforts contrast with our work on domain-specific assessment. We're defining the forms of reasoning that emerge from understanding fundamental non-intuitive concepts unique to specific disciplines, such as evolution for biology or supply-and-demand models for economics. Although there are some aspects of reasoning well within a domain that likely contribute to overall improved critical thinking, we think a clear analysis of cognitive aspects of reasoning well within a specific domain might be useful too. We have seen how common sense critical thinking does not work well if you're asked to analyze a problem through a lens of a specific domain's core concepts. At best, generic critical thinking can get you positioned to learn the "big ideas" in a domain, but does not substitute for that content knowledge.

Higher Ed Accountability: The Latest

A group of colleges that focus on training adult workers has developed an accountability system that reports on student satisfaction and learning outcomes achieved, according to an article from Inside Higher Ed. Sponsored by mostly online higher education programs, the new Tranparency by Design online site aims to address the questions working adults have about going back to school. Just launched, the site provides some results from student satisfaction surveys about whether students liked the program, would recommend it to others, and whether they felt what they learned was useful in the workplace. This effort spans 4-year and 2-year programs. It is the latest among efforts to provide quick access to higher education accountability data, such as College Portraits, which involves 302 colleges that are voluntarily making data public, University and College Accountability Network (UCAN), which involves independent colleges, the federal government's College Navigator site, and the Education Conservancy's CollegeSpeak website. Another complement to the transparency effort is the Tuning USA project sponsored by the Lumina Foundation, which involves faculty from several cooperating higher education institutions in establishing the primary learning outcomes required in the select set of fields of biology, chemistry, education, history, physics and graphic design. For more, see this link. Their report is due in late 2009.

Student Services Investment Matters

A new study finds student graduation rates at four-year universities increase with higher investment in student support services. Conducted by a graduate student in economics, Douglas Webber, and Ronald Ehrenberg, director of Cornell's University's Higher Education Institute, the study uses data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). These data were released to the Delta Cost Project, an effort to study rising tuition costs in higher education. One finding that the authors call "disturbing" is that higher expenditures in research correlate with lower graduation rates. The report also finds that spending more on student services, even if that involves spending less on instruction, improves graduation rates. The authors caution that these data require deeper analysis to inform institutional policy, but the findings are thought-provoking.

Obama's Community College Stimulus Package

President Obama's $12 billion community college stimulus promises more funding for online education, workforce training, and program completion, and response was generally positive from the educators. The president made the speech at Macomb Community College in a Detroit suburb. Community college expert James Jacobs, recently of the Community College Research Center at Columbia University, recently became president of Macomb. The focus on community college represents another sign that this segment of higher education will receive more prominence in this administration. Earlier this year, Obama nominated Martha Kanter, former chancellor of the Foothill-DeAnza Community College District in Northern California, as Under Secretary of Education.

Accountability Analysis

States vary widely in how they track college student achievement, according to a new report cited in Inside Higher Ed. Responses to the report are mixed. While the call to account is generally lauded, but attempts to characterize progress as a horse race strike some as gimmicky. In our project, Domain-Specific Assessment, which is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences, we are finding what cognitive scientists such as John Anderson and Richard Clark have found all along: Getting experts, such as postsecondary educators, to articulate the learning outcomes that matter is not so easy. Part of the problem is psychological: When someone becomes an expert in any field, lots of the cognitive work becomes automatic, chunked, and unconscious. Multiple steps become routines that are no longer carefully parsed. This can lead to a gap in how we articulate what it is that students need to learn in higher education. To see full report, check column to left.

Graduation rates in different colleges

A recent report reveals wide disparities in graduation rates between colleges of comparable selectivity and competitiveness. The American Enterprise Institute has published a report that identifies the colleges and their performances. Inside Higher Education has published an overview of the report.