Last week’s column looked at the College Learning Assessment as a tool to measure real-world learning in our colleges and universities. The test, researched and developed at Stanford University, is endorsed by a commission in the U.S. Department of Education and by the Association of American Colleges and Universities. So why haven’t we heard about it? In education, everything takes time. It took decades to improve school lunches, and most schools still operate on the 19th century model of conveyor-belt (separate subject) learning. With testing, we are saddled with the multiple-choice models of 50 years ago — updated by state legislatures, but not very different from the tests we’ve always taken. Colleges have largely guarded the autonomy of their faculty, and refused to endorse testing measures, except in cases of individual subject areas for admission to graduate programs.
| What Kids Are Reading |
| This weekly column looks at lists of books kids are reading in various categories. Information on the books below came from Amazon.com’s list of children’s best-sellers; they are listed in order of popularity. |
| Christmas stories |
| What Child Is This? A Christmas Story by Caroline Cooney (Ages 9-12) |
| Angels and other Strangers: Family Christmas Stories by Katharine Paterson (Ages 8-13) |
| A Christmas Greeting; A Series of Stories by Hans Christian Andersen (Young adult) |
| The Burglar and the Blizzard, A Christmas Story by Alice Duer Miller (Young adult) |
| Burn, Christmas! Burn! by Brian Gage and Jeff Petersen (Young adult) |
| The Twelve Dates of Christmas by Catherine Hapka (Young adult) |
| A Christmas Memory by Truman Capote and Etienne Delessert (Young adult) |
| Christmas in My Heart by Joe Wheeler (Young adult) |
All that is about to change with the CLA, which has the lofty goal of measuring student skills valued in most college mission statements. Those statements usually include the development of higher-order thinking skills, and the ability to analyze and synthesize information in a world where conflicting information is available online. Students entering real-world situations need to be able to sift the valid from the nonsense, and make a case, with relevant evidence, for their conclusions.
Those taking the CLA, which so far has been administered on a voluntary basis in fewer than 200 colleges, must accomplish tasks that measure the skills listed above. Students might be given documents relating to a small airplane crash that they need to synthesize and analyze in order to make a recommendation to their employer on the purchase of that model — including interoffice e-mails, newspaper articles on the crash, the federal accident report on crashes of similar planes, an amateur pilot’s assessment of the plane, and the manufacturer’s data on the plane’s characteristics.
The student’s job is clear: sift through the documents and separate anecdote and opinion from hard evidence. Then the student would be asked to compose a recommendation on the plane’s purchase.
As a second task, students must critique an argument, revealing what elements are opinion-based and not founded on credible evidence. Third, they must “make an argument” based on a given prompt, such as “In our time, specialists of all kinds are highly overrated. We need more generalists — people who can provide broad perspectives.”
These three tasks illustrate valuable skills for students regardless of their majors. Scientists and accountants alike need to be able to critique and make arguments, and synthesize information so that their recommendations are based on credible evidence. The test reflects what students need to be able to do with their educations, rather than what facts they’ve learned.
The scores from the test will also be used more intelligently than the usual scores on standardized tests: Faculty will be able to gauge how well their courses ready students for real-life tasks. Faculty development is one of the chief goals of the CLA.
Generally, I despise standardized tests. Advanced Placement English tests have, up to now, been the only exception. Now I can add the College Learning Assessment to AP as the only valuable measures of a student’s learning.
Erica Jacobs, whose column appears Wednesday, teaches at George Mason University. E-mail her at [email protected]
