Assessing the Generic Outcomes of College E-Book

Gary R. Pike

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Serie: Assessment Update Special Collections
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 129

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

What does college teach, really? As demands for accountability intensify, meaningful measurement of broad college outcomes becomes increasingly important. Here, you'll take a journey through the history of assessment instruments, starting with the creation of the first general outcomes assessment tools in the 1980s. You'll follow the evolution of the tools, writing and critical thinking, and finally the concept of value-added analysis, an appealing but elusive goal for assessors.

Leseprobe

Contents

Introduction: Assessing the Generic Outcomes of College: Selections from “Assessment Measures”

Commercially Available Measures

Writing Assessment

Assessing Critical Thinking

Assessing Value Added

A Concluding Note

Section One: General Education Assessment

Instruments for Assessing General Education Outcomes

The College Outcome Measures Program (COMP) Examination

Joint Task Force of the Interinstitutional Committee of Academic Officers and State Board for Community College Education

Criteria for Evaluating Assessment Instruments

The College Basic Academic Subjects Examination

The Academic Profile II

The Collegiate Learning Assessment

Content

Administration and Score Reports

Psychometric Properties

Section Two: Writing Assessment

Designing Comprehensive Writing Assessments

Implementing a Large-Scale Writing Assessment

Section Three: Critical Thinking Assessment

Assessing the Critical Thinking Abilities of College Students

The Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal

The California Critical Thinking Skills Test

Tasks in Critical Thinking

The Reflective Judgment Interview

The CRESST Problem-Solving Measures

A New Approach to Measuring Critical Thinking

Reliability and Validity Results

Section Four: Value-Added Assessment

Freshman-to-Senior Gains at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Methods of Evaluating Student Change During College

Revisiting the Blind Alley of Value Added

Research-Based Conclusions About Value Added

A Brief Explanation of Value-Added Concerns

Alternative Measures

Conclusion

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INTRODUCTION

Assessing the Generic Outcomes of College: Selections from “Assessment Measures”

The broad outcomes of a college education have been described using a variety of terms, including general education outcomes and generic skills or outcomes. I am particularly fond of Baird’s (1988) characterization of these outcomes as the “diverse and subtle arts.” Although the outcomes have gone by many names, higher education leaders and policy makers have consistently stressed the importance of the generic outcomes of college. Both the National Education Goals Panel (1991) and the Secretary of Education’s (Spellings) Commission on the Future of Higher Education (U.S. Department of Education, 2006), for example, stressed the importance of assessing and improving the generic skills of critical thinking, communicating, and problem-solving. Given this high level of interest, it is not surprising that a significant number of “Assessment Measures” columns have focused on issues related to the assessment of the generic outcomes of a college education. Many of these columns are included in this collection, and they can be grouped into four broad categories: (1) commercially available measures of general education outcomes, (2) writing assessment, (3) assessment of critical thinking, and (4) assessing the value added by a college education. The first three categories roughly correspond to the content areas identified in major national reports, and the final category includes columns focusing on how best to represent the unique contributions of a college education.