Ensuring the Quality and Productivity of Education and Professional Development Activities: A Rev... more Ensuring the Quality and Productivity of Education and Professional Development Activities: A Review of Approaches and Lessons for DoD RAND Susan M. Gates, Catherine H. Augustine, Roger Benjamin, Tora K. Bikson, Eric Derghazarian, Tessa Kaganoff.
Ensuring the Quality and Productivity of Education and Professional Development Activities: A Rev... more Ensuring the Quality and Productivity of Education and Professional Development Activities: A Review of Approaches and Lessons for DoD RAND Susan M. Gates, Catherine H. Augustine, Roger Benjamin, Tora K. Bikson, Eric Derghazarian, Tessa Kaganoff.
Learning Assessment (CLA) as one of " the most comprehensive national efforts to measure how much... more Learning Assessment (CLA) as one of " the most comprehensive national efforts to measure how much students actually learn at different campuses " and that the CLA, " promotes a culture of evidence-based assessment in higher education " (p. 22). The Commission went on to recommend that " higher education institutions should measure student learning using quality assessment data from instruments such as, for example, the Collegiate Learning Assessment, which measures the growth of student learning taking place in colleges… " (p. 23). The Association of American Colleges and Universities concurred, as did the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) (2006, p. 4): The best example of direct value-added assessment is the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), an outgrowth of RAND's Value Added Assessment Initiative (VAAI) that has been available to colleges and universities since spring 2004. The test goes beyond a multiple-choice format and poses real-world performance tasks that require students to analyze complex material and provide written responses (such as preparing a memo or policy recommendation). When a relatively novel assessment of student learning receives this kind of praise and attention, it rightfully gets put under the microscope. Questions are raised about what it measures, its technical qualities, and its usefulness. Committees review the instruments, and opinions are formed about their strengths and weaknesses, sometimes by their competitors, rightly or wrongly. The CLA is a case in point. For example, Banta and Pike (2007) have raised questions about the appropriateness of the CLA's value added approach to learning assessment. And Kuh (2006) has expressed concerns about the CLA's reliability and utility. Consequently, the time seems right to present, albeit briefly, the approach the CLA program takes to assessment and score reporting, the types of measures it uses, the similarities and differences between the CLA approach and the methods used by other large-scale programs, and finally, some of the important statistical properties of the CLA's measures, including their reliability.
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Papers by Roger Benjamin