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How much are students learning in college? That question begs another one: What should students be learning in college? In Our Underachieving Colleges, former president of Harvard, Derek Bok, proposed a range of goals, from learning to communicate to developing character and learning to live in a diverse and global society. He also pointed out that while faculty rarely agree on the purposes of higher education and tend to shy away from discussions of values and morals, they overwhelmingly agree that their students should learn how to think critically. Indeed, a recent study by the Higher Education Research Institute noted that virtually all faculty report that developing students' ability to think critically is a very important or essential goal of undergraduate education, as is promoting students' ability to write effectively.
But even if faculty concur that students should develop critical thinking and writing skills (among many others) during college, the question remains of how those skills should be assessed. In its critique of higher education, the Spellings' Commission claimed, based on findings from the National Assessment of Adult Literacy, that “the quality of student learning at U.S. colleges and universities is inadequate and, in some cases, declining.” The Commission also highlighted some promising attempts to assess collegiate learning, including the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA). Since then, the CLA, along with the Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency (CAAP) and the Measure of Academic Proficiency and Progress (MAPP), has been adopted by the Voluntary System of Accountability (VSA) as a measure that institutions may use to report on the learning of their students in the VSA's College Portrait.
Josipa Roksa is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Virginia.
Richard Arum is a professor of sociology and education at New York University and program director of educational research at the Social Science Research Council. They are co-authors of Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press). The authors thank the Lumina Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ford Foundation, and the Teagle Foundation for their generous financial support for this project and are grateful to the Council for Aid to Education for its collaboration and assistance with data collection.
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