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A Warning on Measuring Learning Outcomes
By Trudy W. Banta, in Inside Higher Ed (January 26, 2007)
In a recent article in Inside Higher Ed, Trudy W. Banta brings her experience in assessment to bear on the debate—which has intensified in the wake of the Spellings Commission’s Report on the Future of Higher Education—about the use of standardized tests in higher education. Banta, a professor of higher education and vice chancellor for planning and institutional improvement at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, contends that standardized tests “cannot furnish meaningful information on the value added by a college education nor can they provide a sound basis for inter-institutional comparisons.” Standardized tests are not “content neutral” and can measure only a small part of the knowledge and skills that students develop in college, she says, and if implemented, they could have a narrowing, homogenizing influence on curricula.
Banta also questions the wisdom of the underlying goal of comparing institutional effectiveness. It is “by design,” she writes, that different campuses “are pursuing diverse missions and thus attracting students with different interests, abilities, levels of motivation, and career aspirations”—indeed, this diversity has been recognized as “one of the great strengths of higher education in the United States.” If assessment of student learning must be adapted to permit institutional comparisons, she argues, electronic portfolios and discipline-based measures that allow students to apply knowledge would offer more authentic measures of student learning.
The full text of Trudy W. Banta’s article is available from Inside Higher Ed.
See Our Students’ Best Work for the AAC&U board of directors’ statement on assessment and the AAC&U board’s Statement on the Final Spellings Commission Report.
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