Excerpts from the NY Times

Excerpts from the NY Times article by James Traub on September 30, 2007

AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CHARLESTON…incoming students take a standardized test designed to measure reasoning and writing skills and then take the test again after sophomore year and once again as seniors — to see if their education is doing them any good. Courses are constructed around a series of defined “liberal learning outcomes” like critical thinking and creativity, and if the students’ work shows that many of them aren’t hitting the outcomes, the teachers go back to the drawing board. Ditto with the standardized tests. “We take data seriously,” says Alan Belcher, a member of the Faculty Center that rides herd on the whole process, “and we act on it.” Apparently they act well: in its promotional materials, U.C. boasts that it posted “the largest learning gain from first to final year” of any of the 40 schools that participated in a trial of the Collegiate Learning Assessment, one test it uses.

This orientation toward measurable outcomes has already colonized many spheres of life — K-12 education, medicine, government services — but in the world of higher education, places like the University of Charleston are lonely outliers. They may soon become the vanguard. The Bush administration, having used the No Child Left Behind Act to impose accountability — and, critics would say, a sterile uniformity — on the reluctant world of public elementary and secondary schools, is now seeking to accomplish something similar in post-secondary education. A commission impaneled by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings concluded last year that colleges “should measure and report meaningful student learning outcomes,” that they should use tests to make comparison possible, that accrediting agencies should make these and other performance outcomes “the core of their assessment” and that colleges should make the results publicly available “as a condition of accreditation.”

WHEN EDWIN WELCH became president of the University of Charleston in 1989…the low road wasn’t working. Welch, a social scientist with a deep fund of common sense and mother wit, concluded that the opportunities lay on the high road of academic competence. As it happened, he also sat on the quality committee of the local hospital, and he heard an administrator of a mental-health center talk about how they had to document quantifiable progress in some patients’ conditions to receive reimbursement. The center was forced to focus on outcomes. “My challenge,” he says, “was, How do I bring this to education?”

A schoolwide process of rethinking, in which you imagine Welch functioned as something more than first among equals, concluded that the school should shape its identity around outcomes. The question that he and his colleagues asked themselves, Welch says, was, “What do you want from a liberal arts education?” The obvious answers were curricular ones — a familiarity with history, with the major works of literature and philosophy, with core scientific disciplines. But curricular mastery, the group concluded, was the means rather than the end. The goal was a set of broad competencies that spanned disciplines: citizenship, communication, creativity, critical thinking, ethical practice and science. The idea was not to teach these skills directly, which would be vapid, but rather to embed them in the curriculum and to shape pedagogy and assignments so that students would gain the competencies in the course of their studies. Thus, for example, a student in the interior-design program can gain “historical understanding” from one specialized class, “foundational creativity” from still others and “research in the discipline” — a science outcome — from yet another. He or she may have to take a class in literature and several in science to satisfy other outcome requirements.

The liberal-learning outcomes are quantifiable — performance on them counts for 20 to 50 percent of a student’s grade — but not, of course, standardized. Yet Charleston does believe strongly in standardized tests, at least good ones. Seven years ago, the school began administering a test now known as MAPP, which showed that in several cognitive areas its students were making more progress in their first two years than students at similar liberal-arts colleges were in four. But students were making little additional progress in the last two years, and perhaps in the last three. So the faculty decided to embed more critical-thinking outcomes in courses that students encounter in later years. When the C.L.A. was introduced, Charleston quickly instituted it. When the test was administered in 2005-6, incoming freshmen scored well below where their SAT scores would have predicted, while seniors scored at par. No other school showed such gains. The “gains,” of course, were extrapolated from two different sets of students, at the beginning and at the end of their college careers — not a very convincing outcome. That hasn’t stopped Charleston from boasting about the results. Certainly there’s no denying that Ed Welch’s bold act of repositioning has transformed the school. U.C. now has about 1,400 students. Average SAT scores of incoming students are rising, and the school has begun to turn some applicants away. Six of the 10 campus buildings have gone up in the last decade. The endowment has reached $35 million. And in the ultimate market affirmation, U.S. News & World Report now ranks U.C. among the Top 20 baccalaureate colleges in the South.

To read the article in its entirety, click here.
To read Dr. Welch's op-ed piece regarding this article, click here.