Measures of Quality: Telling the Story of Higher Education

1. Measures of Quality:Telling the Story of Higher Education Michigan Association of Institution Research November 8, 2012

2. College on the Defensive Books: • Higher Education? How Colleges are Wasting our Money and Failing our Kids and What We Can Do About It (Hacker, Dreifus) • Academically Adrift (Arum, Roksa) • College: What It Was, Is and Should Be (Delbanco) • Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More (Bok)

3. Losing Ground “While the United States still ranks second of Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries in terms of adult workers’ bachelor degree attainment, it has dropped to sixth when higher education attainment of only the most recent cohort of young adults is considered.” –Academically Adrift, p. 123

4. Why doesn’t everyone benefit? “With a large sample of 2,300 students, we observe no statistically significant gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills for at least 45 percent of the students in our study.” –Academically Adrift, p. 36

5. Midwest Alliance for Learning in the Liberal Arts – Teagle Project Goals • To determine the effect that our schools have on student growth in writing, critical thinking and civic engagement. • To explore ways to do authentic value-added assessment more effectively • To better understand nationally normed instruments such as SAT/ACT, NSSE, CLA • To assess outliers practices to see what works

6. Methodology • Collect papers meeting specified criteria • Read in double-blind study (faculty did not know school or student class) • If low correlation, have third reader • Compare average score on first year papers to those of junior and senior papers • Compare to ACT/SAT

7. Midwest Alliance for Learning in the Liberal Arts

8. Midwest Alliance for Learning in the Liberal Arts

9. Wabash National Study • Critical thinking • Need for cognition • Interest in and attitudes about diversity • Leadership • Moral reasoning • Well-being

10. WNS 2006-2009 Cohort/ Figure 1. Four-year student change measured in standard deviations for moral reasoning, critical thinking, socially responsible leadership, and need for cognition.

11. Figure 2. Four-year student change measured in standard deviations for psychological well-being, universality-diversity awareness, political and social involvement, and openness to diversity and challenge diversity and challenge.

12. “Although these changes are small, and often in the wrong direction, these data report only the averages and do not capture the full range of student change within each institution. There are groups of students at every institution who have been positively transformed by their educational experience, as there are students who are intellectually worse off then when they started.” www.liberalarts.wabash.edu/study-overview/

13. “We always hope for the easy fix: the one simple change that will erase a problem in a stroke. But few things in life work this way. Instead, success requires making a hundred small steps go right – one after the other, no slipups, no goofs, everyone pitching in.” -Atul Gawande, Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance

14. Thank you.