We all remember how differently each one of our college professors taught. There were the informal, class-discussion types, the large lecture types, the ones who were tethered to their PowerPoint presentations, and the charismatic performers. Some were great at what they did, and some were not; I found that the teaching technique was not what made one professor better than another; it had more to do with their idiosyncratic styles. Saying that college professors should simply learn how to teach “better” — whatever “better” means — doesn’t take into account the magic that can be part of a teacher’s delivery. (It’s also true that a weak professor can make even a fascinating subject boring.) An integral part of any testing initiative has been professional development designed to help teachers become more effective at boosting student scores. The problem is that those workshops oversimplify the learning process by assuming that learning is based on the merit of the message.

Workshops, like classrooms, are only as successful as the messenger. That is why the College Learning Assessment tests, the subject of my last two columns, may run into trouble at the level of faculty training. One of its selling points is the promise that professors will alter their teaching methods to improve student performance on the real-world tasks measured by the CLA.