As we return from spring break, arrangements are well under way for SCI's annual Assessment Day Wednesday, March 28. Sophomores eligible to take the CAAP tests in reading and mathematics will be excused from 10 o'clock and 11 o'clock classes, a raffle will be held and free food will be served on Ginkgo Square. Please make every effort to talk it up with your students. We take a voluntary approach to the standardized testing we are mandated to do at SCI, and we need everybody's cooperation to make it work.
The Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency (CAAP) is a standardized, nationally normed assessment tool. To make a long story short, we pay the test vendor ACT Inc. to compare our sophomores' math and reading scores to their results on the ACT tests they took in high school. Those linkages give us a rough idea of "value added," in other words what they've learned since they came to us as freshmen.
So it's important we get a good turnout on Assessment Day.
Student Affairs Dean Kevin Broeckling, who is putting together arrangements for this year's test, reports that four classrooms in Dawson Hall have been reserved for testing. Students will be asked to report to the 2nd floor Dawson first, and assigned to rooms from there. We have 120 students eligible to take the tests, and 130 Reading and Math modules have been ordered. Since our population is too small for statistical sampling, all eligible students should take both tests.
"We want to make sure students taking the assessment are not penalized for missing classes," Kevin told the assessment committee. That's important. To put it bluntly, we want a good student response because we want good data. I tell my students: (1) We are required to administer standardized tests as part of the assessment plan we presented for accreditation; and (2) since we have to do it anyway, we may as well get data we can use to improve the education we offer them.
While colleges and universities nationwide gear up to administer standardized tests like the CAAP this spring for accountability purposes, the U.S. Education Department continues to give mixed signals on what appears to be a concerted effort to use federal regulations to mandate a nationwide regimen of standardized testing for accountability purposes. Whether any such testing now occurs outside the Washington Beltway is a point that has not, to my knowledge, been addressed in any depth by federal policymakers.
It's a continuing saga. On the one hand, the Education Department may be tap-dancing away from an earlier standardized testing gambit, that it use the IPEDS (Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System) process to force colleges to collect learning outcomes data by means of standardized testing, according to an update in the online newsletter Inside Higher Ed on March 9. According to newsletter reporter Doug Lederman:
The U.S. Education Department announced Thursday that it would rein in its recent proposal to significantly expand the information it collects annually from colleges through a federal online database.While the evidence Lederman has been able to gather is convoluted, he takes the Federal Register notice to mean the Department is backing off. He adds:Although a notice published Thursday in the Federal Register declined to specify which of the proposed new information the department would forgo, the department’s top research official said its leaders would almost definitely not ask colleges to report on how they fare on measures of student learning outcomes. It would be inappropriate for the federal government to collect that type of information, said Grover J. (Russ) Whitehurst, director of the Institute for Education Sciences.
“We understand in the current environment that people see this as a foot in the door for a potential move some time in the future to require some kind of student learning outcome, by providing strong incentives to collect that,” Whitehurst said. “We think that’s a state or association role to move in that direction. It exceeds the response of a federal authority or control to be incentivizing that kind of collection
... Thursday’s notice did not say which information the department had decided not to collect, and Whitehurst said that “no final decisions” would be made until the comment period ends March 26. In addition to the accountability proposal, college leaders have also objected that the notice’s call for significantly expanded reporting about the financial aid institutions provide to students, which officials have said would impose a significant reporting burden.)So in the end, what it amounts to is hints shrouded in whispers shrouded in more hints and whispers. Washington politics as it has been played the last 216 years or so, in other words.But Congressional staff members said that a department official had told them Wednesday that the department would abandon the proposal to ask colleges to report which tests and other measures of student learning outcomes they use, as well as their scores on those measures.
Whitehurst said that was “very likely,” given that department officials had concluded that that is not the sort of information a federal agency should collect.
In the meantime, an article on the Bush administration's higher ed policy in U.S. News & World Report says the Education Department is launching "one of the most ambitious and controversial higher-education reforms in recent history" by requiring what it says a new kind of standardized testing:
It's called "value added," an elusive measurement of the thinking skills and the body of knowledge that students acquire between their freshman and senior years. In other words, how much smarter are students when they leave college than when they got there? Trying to quantify that value—and assessing how effective each of the nation's 4,200 colleges is at delivering it—is at the heart of one of the most ambitious and controversial higher-education reforms in recent history.The magazine does not indicate whether it realizes any colleges are now testing for value added.Later this month, U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings will meet with college leaders to discuss the findings of her Commission on the Future of Higher Education and its plan to assess college learning through one or a number of standardized tests. "For years the colleges in this country have said, 'We're the best in the world; give us money and leave us alone,'" says Charles Miller, the chairman of the commission. "The higher-ed community needs to fess up to the public's concerns."
Instead, the U.S. News & World Report story, by staff writer Alex Kingbury, is a good overview of the backing and filling that accompanied the Spelling Commission's deliberations last year and the Ed Department's efforts to implement its recommendations -- including but not limited to those on nationwide standardized testing -- since it issued its final report in September. If you want a readable lay person's explanation of what the feds are up to, what the overall reaction has been so far and where it might lead in the future, it's as good as anything I've seen in following the politicking for a year and a half now. If you want a chilling account of why SCI and Benedictine might get swooped up into a massive federal boondoggle along the lines of No Child Left Behind, Kingsbury's story fits that bill, too.
Thanks so much to Jeff Mueller for giving me a copy of the March 12 issue of U.S. News & World Report in dead tree (paper) format.