This week, I had the opportunity to attend the American Council on Education’s (ACE) annual meeting in Washington, DC.  The theme of this year’s conference was Reaching Higher, but the underlying theme seemed to be “the winds of change are upon us.”

Sunday’s session for presidents and chancellors had the following topics:  Vision and Change at BYU-Idaho: A Model for America’s Colleges and Universities, Information Technology:  Seize the Day, and a luncheon at which Terry Hartle, SVP of Government and Public Affairs of ACE spoke about the pending Department of Education regulations regarding Credit Hours, State Regulation, Gainful Employment, Accreditation, and Misrepresentation.  Later in the day, Yale’s President Richard Levin spoke about “Why Colleges and Universities Matter.”  I also attended a session hosted by Stan Ikenberry, former president of the University of Illinois and ACE, and George Kuh, Professor Emeritus of Higher Education at Indiana University Bloomington and the founding director of the Center for Postsecondary Research and the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), regarding assessment and ways in which institutions implement it.

Having the conference in Washington provided some benefits.  Eduardo Ochoa, Assistant Secretary of Postsecondary Education at the U.S. Department of Education was an unscheduled speaker at the luncheon and provided a few comments regarding the administration’s position regarding higher education and reminded the group that he had served as a provost at Sonoma State University.  He also stated that he was unable to provide a statement about three of the issues because of a lawsuit against the Department.  Terry Hartle’s major points were that the industry can regulate itself and does not need increased federal regulation at a time when there are many changes occurring as well as innovations required in order to remain competitive.

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I had the opportunity to present a paper this week at the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education’s (AACE) E-Learn 2010 conference in Orlando along with Dr. Phil Ice, our Director of Course Design, Research & Development.  The paper, Comprehensive Assessment of Student Retention in Online Learning Environments, originated from research that I conducted as part of my doctoral dissertation at The University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education.

Student retention has been an issue in higher education since the late 1800’s.  Some of the early research in the area began in the 1930’s but the volume of research studies increased substantially in the 1960’s through the present era.  Early research focused on psychological reasons for students to drop out of college but most of the literature since the late 1970’s have focused on sociological issues.

While there are many significant contributors to the research of student retention (William Spady, Alexander Astin,  Vincent Tinto, John M. Braxton, George Kuh, Ernest Pascarella, etc.), Vincent Tinto’s Leaving College: Rethinking the Causes and Cures of Student Attrition provides a fairly thorough overview of many research studies (note:  the second edition of this book was published in 1994 and new copies are difficult to find).

Tinto is given credit for developing the first theoretical construct of predicting student retention.  Three major areas of his theory involve the importance of the background characteristics of college students, the social integration of students with their college, and the academic integration of students with their professors and programs.  Subsequent research studies have focused on some of these areas and/or attempted to prove or disprove the original construct.  Colleges and universities use some of the studies as the basis for their internal retention research or external explanations of their graduation rate.

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On October 26, 2009, the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA) issued the results of its first annual survey of Provosts and Chief Academic Officers.  When I read the press release and skimmed through the survey, I asked Dr. Jennifer Stephens, our Associate Vice President and Dean of Assessment, to provide me with a guest article describing the survey and the significant findings.

For those of us working for regionally accredited, market-driven institutions, the survey confirms that we utilize assessment and assessment tools in many more ways than traditional research institutions.  I cannot speak for all for-profit institutions, but we embraced assessment as a tool when we realized its value in diagnosing what worked and what didn’t as the online learning field continued to evolve through improvements in pedagogy and technology.  A group of like-minded, for profit and non-profit institutions joined together to form Transparency by Design (TBD), an initiative to publish learning outcomes in a common reporting format.  As we continue to utilize assessment for quality improvement, our faculty will gain the knowledge of what works better for online teaching and our students will benefit through better designed and better instructed classes and programs.  Organizations like NILOA and TBD will share best practices with the goal of providing better outcomes for students.

I think you will enjoy reading the results of the survey as summarized by Dr. Stephens.   I look forward to seeing future surveys that indicate that progress in the utilization of assessment tools is being made by all institutions of higher education.

Over the past decade, calls for assessment and accountability have increased as the educational community has become more vocal about the need to be more systematic in assessing student performance.  This is evidenced by: 1) regional and national meetings that focus on assessment; 2) accountability initiatives such as the Voluntary System of Accountability (VSA), University and College Accountability Network (U-CAN), and Transparency by Design; and 3) the recent sharp increase of assessment tools and organizations that focus on the assessment of student learning outcomes.

To better understand the dynamics of student learning outcomes assessment in higher education institutions, the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA) was launched in 2008 to assist institutions and others in discovering and adopting promising practices in the assessment of college student learning outcomes. The vision of the NILOA is to discover and disseminate ways that schools can productively use assessment data internally to inform and strengthen undergraduate education, and externally to communicate with policy makers, families and other stakeholders.  The NILOA project is based at the University of Illinois and Indiana University. Stan Ikenberry and George Kuh serve as co-principal investigators, and Peter Ewell serves as a Senior Scholar. The initiative is guided by a National Advisory Panel and supported by foundations including Lumina Foundation for Education, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the Teagle Foundation.

To advance their mission and as their first big project, the NILOA surveyed provosts or chief academic officers at all regionally accredited, undergraduate-degree-granting, two and four year, public, private, and for-profit institutions in the U.S. about the assessment activities conducted at their institutions.  In the spring of 2009, the questionnaire was administered to 2809 institutions.  There was a 53% response rate with 1518 schools responding.  

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