Admission officers often talk about standardized test scores, from the SAT to the ACT and beyond. But with legislation in Washington proposing standardized assessment for college students, University Hall has become embroiled in a nationwide debate over a different kind of assessment in higher education.
The discussion was sparked over two years ago, when Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings created the Commission on the Future of Higher Education. The commission, often referred to as the Spellings Commission, was charged with determining how well college students are being prepared for life beyond campus, especially in the workplace.
"It is a good question to be asking - what is the value added by going to school for four years?" said Brenda Allen, associate provost and director of institutional diversity.
But while many in academia say the commission's inquiry was laudable, its findings caused worry among university officials across the country.
Issued in 2006, the Spellings report found that prose literacy "for all levels of educational attainment" and document literacy "among those with at least some college education" decreased between 1992 and 2003. In addition, the report said, "employers complain that many college graduates are not prepared for the workplace" and parents and students "have no solid evidence, comparable across institutions, of how much students learn in colleges."
Among other recommendations, the report suggested that "higher education institutions should measure student learning using quality-assessment data" from standardized tests.
"The general response to the Spellings report has been fairly critical," said Provost David Kertzer '69 P'95 P'98. "One of the concerns is the need to deal with all of higher education as if it were the same."
Speaking at the Teaching Forum of Brown's Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning in September, Kathryn Spoehr '69, professor of cognitive and linguistic sciences, characterized the commission's findings as follows:
"(Colleges) are being told that all students in all institutions should graduate having mastered the same set of knowledge and skills, that these skills can and should be measured by a standardized test and that we can evaluate the quality of a school by how much its students' test scores improve between entry and graduation," Spoehr said at the forum.
Spoehr, a former provost, dean of the Graduate School and dean of the faculty, is herself a member of the New England Association of Schools and Colleges - she evaluates other schools' reaccreditation processes - and is member of the University steering committee charged with overseeing Brown's reaccreditation process.
The Department of Education intends to implement changes in student assessment through the six national accreditation agencies, Spoehr told The Herald.
Accreditation agencies were created as nongovernmental watchdogs for education systems at all levels, from kindergarten to the doctoral level. Membership in one of the regional agencies is synonymous with accreditation, and all colleges that are accredited are eligible for government funding, including Pell grants and Stafford loans.
A proposed amendment to reauthorize the Higher Education Act could give colleges much less say in how they assess student
performance.
The bill, debated by the House of Representatives committee on education and labor, is currently in line for a floor vote, said Tim Leshan, Brown's director of government relations and community affairs.
"It would move power for assessing the work of the students in higher education from the university to creating some potential standards by the Department of Education," Leshan said. In other words, universities might no longer be able to set their standards for assessment. Instead, the federal government could impose universal assessment criteria.
"The Department of Education is suggesting something so extreme to our business practices and what we know," Allen said. "There will be resistance simply as educators - we should not allow ourselves to be held to that."
"As conversation moves more and more towards (a resolution), there will be compromises," she said. "My real belief is that we will find that happy medium."
The University, a member of the NEASC, is in the early stages of its reaccreditation process with the association, which it undertakes every 10 years.
"We're trying to be proactive," said Allen, who is the University's primary liaison with NEASC.
Allen said the association created a set of models that institutions could use to assess their students performance. These models range from the use of standardized tests to a claims-based assessment, which is the method that has been tentatively adopted by the University.
Claims-based assessment is a process by which an institution makes qualitative statements about the expected learning outcomes of its students and then seeks to prove these statements through internal data and studies, Allen said. For example, the University might attempt to prove that Brown students attend the most prestigious graduate schools, join top workplaces or are accepted by the most competitive medical schools, Allen said.
With each reaccreditation cycle, the University is required to prepare a self-study documenting how well it is meeting its own goals and mission. Allen said this self-study will prove the crux of Brown's attempt to demonstrate its assessment abilities - both to NEASC and the Department of Education.
"We are very much proceeding on the idea that it would be useful and necessary for Brown to think of (assessment methods) that would make sense in terms of outcomes of student learning in a Brown perspective," said Dean of the College Katherine Bergeron.
