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Want to know how many students at UL completed their degree in four, five or six years?
Or the ratio of students to faculty?
Or maybe how well students at UL master core learning outcomes such as critical thinking and written communication by the time they graduate?
Sometime early next year, that information and more data will be easily available on UL’s Web site for parents and prospective students as part of a national initiative called the Voluntary System of Accountability.
UL, along with the seven other universities within the UL System, are part of an initiative called the Voluntary System of Accountability. The VSA was created through a partnership between two national higher education organizations — the American Association of State Colleges and Universities and the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges.
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Marsha Sills
msills@theadvertiser.com
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The idea behind VSA is to provide the public data about higher educational institutions beyond their sticker price and recruitment marketing — like how well students are performing and how well the graduates of today are prepared. The online system uses a template and places a requirement on some of the features that universities must include.
Unlike primary and secondary schools, which test student and school performance, higher education institutions haven’t been held to the same accountability scrutiny.
Over the past few years, federal officials and lawmakers been pressing for transparency, particularly among those institutions that receive public funding.
While institutions, including UL, have long been assessing the learning outcomes of their students beyond what shows up on their transcripts, the move is now toward sharing that information with the public.
“A lot of it goes back to the fact that resources are limited and higher ed competes with other needs,” said Brad O’Hara, UL System vice president of student affairs and the UL System’s VSA coordinator. “We have to demonstrate to the public and lawmakers that we’re responsible in the spending of the money that they allocate to us each year. Part of that shows that we’re graduating folks in a timely fashion and graduating folks in areas that are required in this 21st century.”
Possibly in January schools will receive the Web templates to begin uploading their information, O’Hara said.
The UL System was the first in the country to sign its eight institutions on to the initiative when registration opened a few days ago.
The initiative coincides with assessment plans already in place at UL, said Paula Carson, a UL marketing professor who is also the university’s assessment coordinator.
Some professional colleges within the university — education, engineering, nursing, and business — have existing assessments in place in line with their professional accreditation agencies.
Soon, all colleges within UL will develop their own assessments specific to majors.
That assessment is in line with requirements by the institution’s accrediting body — the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools or SACS.
About 15 or 20 years ago, SACS charged its institutions with monitoring institutional effectiveness, said Carolyn Bruder, UL’s director of academic planning and faculty development and assistant vice president of academic affairs. That focus has been narrowed to assessing what students are learning.
“I think SACS was ahead of the curve,” Bruder said. “It’s been an evolution. ... The push right now is student learning and asking the questions, ‘What should they have learned? Did they learn it?’ ”
As part of its VSA participation, UL students will participate in two tests — the Collegiate Learning Assessment and student engagement survey. The university has decided to alternate between the National Survey of Student Engagement and the Student Opinion Survey to help wage student perceptions of the university.
The CLA and engagement surveys are administered by independent, third parties. Not all students take the tests. A random sample of students is selected for both assessments. It’s not high-stakes assessment, but gives better indication of performance.
The NSSE asks students about their experience during their college career.
Questions range from how much class time students spent with faculty, opportunities for leadership development to assess their involvement in college in and outside the classroom.
“Studies show that students who are more engaged are more willing learners and effective learners,” Carson said.
The CLA, assesses critical thinking, analytic reasoning, written communication and problem solving. It’s not the typical standardized, fill-in-the circle after a multiple choice question variety. Some parts present problems or real-life tasks or situations to the test taker, who then must decide a course of action.
It’s a value-added assessment that offers institutions information on how much students learn while in college by testing first-time, full-time freshmen and outgoing seniors.
For instance, if in the fall, if freshmen score a 2 on the CLA on a scale of 1-10 and in the spring seniors score a 7 on the same scale, the value added is 5, Carson explained.
“It’s about institutional performance,” Carson said. “If we identify students are not mastering a general education outcome, we’re not going back to a particular course and say, you have a problem. We want to look at it systemically.”
“We want to have a deeper understanding about what our students are learning and how they most effectively learn,” Carson said.
And that goes beyond grades.
“Grades are not considered a valid indicator, because a student’s grade may include participation and grading curves,” Carson said.
The university’s assessment plans began in the mid-80s with an exam given to all lower division students that determined whether or not they were prepared to move to upper level course work. But the exam was pulled after the university decided that a more effective assessment tool was needed.
“Other schools were going through the same thing,” Bruder said. “That’s what led to the development of CLA. The CLA is a university-developed instrument and it is designed to assess critical thinking skills and writing ability. That’s not something you can do in a standardized test format.”
As part of its plan, the university has also started assessing its general education outcomes, using other testing instruments specific to math, sciences and information technology. The university also plans to gauge outcomes in more subjective areas, such as communication and the arts through external evaluations by experts in that particular field and the evaluation of writing samples from literature courses.
Before the UL System decided to sign on its eight universities to the VSA, UL had decided to participate.
The information will be posted on an easy-to-read and easy-to access portal on the university’s Web site. The VSA is calling the portal, College Portrait and providing universities a template to plug in their information. The template also provides universities the opportunity to add their own features.
Registration for the initiative opened earlier this week, but so far, more than 20 universities and at least four other university systems have signed onto the program. According to information from the VSA received as of Thursday, the UL System and its member universities are the only Louisiana schools registered so far.
Not only will parents and prospective students be able to access demographics, learning outcome data, graduation and retention rates — but costs. The College Portrait also includes a cost calculator so parents can financially plan for their child’s future.
“I think it will help a student find the school that fits the student,” Bruder said. “It also helps us evaluate our own quality. We’re competing against ourselves, but we’re also competing against similar schools with similar missions. We want to benchmark ourselves against each other.”
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