An Approach to Measuring Cognitive Outcomes Across Higher Education Institutions
By S. Klein, George D. Kuh, Marc Chun, L. Hamilton, R. Shavelson. 2005
138 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Over the past decade, state legislatures have experienced increasing pressure to hold higher education accountable for student learning. This pressure stems from several sources, such as increasing costs and decreasing graduation rates. To explore the feasibility of one approach to measuring student learning that emphasizes program improvement, we administered several open-ended tests to 1365 students from 14 diverse colleges. The strong correspondence between hand and computer assigned scores indicates the tests can be administered and graded cost effectively on a large scale. The scores were highly reliable, especially when the college is the unit of analysis; they were sensitive to years in college; and they correlated highly with college GPAs. We also found evidence of “value added” in that scores were significantly higher at some schools than at others after controlling on the school’s mean SAT score. Finally, the students said the tasks were interesting and engaging.
Subfields: Education
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4d2f6b00a21e26c6cca3bc3a699a16f91de8f56f
How researchers see this paper
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In Education
- George D. Kuh
- John C. Beachboard
- Wenling Li
- Martine Robinson Beachboard
- Stephen Adkison
- R. Carini
- Nicholas A. Bowman
- Stephen R. Porter
Citations in the corpus
- What Student Affairs Professionals Need to Know About Student Engagement (2009, background): “, Kuh, G. D., McCormick, A. C., & Ethington, C. A. (2007). If and when money matters: Direct and indirect relationships between expenditures and student learning.”
- Cohorts and Relatedness: Self-Determination Theory as an Explanation of How Learning Communities Affect Educational Outcomes (2011, background): “Higher education institutions are re-examining their educational practices and seeking to demonstrate that they are indeed providing students with the knowledge and skills required to survive and thrive in society (Carle et al. 2009; Education Consortium 2006; Klein et al. 2005 ).”
- Assessment of Learning Outcomes in Higher Education: A Comparative Review of Selected Practices. OECD Education Working Papers, No. 15. (2008, unknown): “Graduate admission tests may be of limited relevance to the learning goals of undergraduate HEIs, and there is a selection bias in who prepares for and takes these tests (Klein et al., 2005).”
- Student Engagement and Student Learning: Testing the Linkages* (2006, methodology): “An earlier study using these data reported that students at certain institutions had higher RAND and GRE scores than would be expected given the typical relationship of these scores with their SAT scores (Klein et al., 2005).”