The Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) is a standardized testing initiative in United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 higher

Higher education

Higher, post-secondary, tertiary, or third level education refers to the stage of learning that occurs at universities, academies, colleges, seminaries, and institutes of technology...

 educational evaluation

Educational evaluation

Educational evaluation is the evaluation process of characterizing and appraising some aspect/s of an educational process.Q. 3 Discuss the role of standards and criteria in educational evaluation...

 and assessment. It uses a "value-added" outcome model to examine a college or university's contribution to student learning which relies on the institution, rather than the individual student, as the primary unit of analysis. The CLA measures are designed to test for critical thinking

Critical thinking

Critical thinking is the process or method of thinking that questions assumptions. It is a way of deciding whether a claim is true, false, or sometimes true and sometimes false, or partly true and partly false. The origins of critical thinking can be traced in Western thought to the Socratic...

, analytic reasoning

Analytic reasoning

-Kant's Usage:In the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, analytic reasoning represents judgments made upon statements that are based on the virtue of the statement's own content. No particular experience, beyond an understanding of the meanings of words used, is necessary for analytic reasoning.For...

, problem solving

Problem solving

Problem solving is a mental process and is part of the larger problem process that includes problem finding and problem shaping. Consideredthe most complex of all intellectual functions, problem solving has been defined as higher-order cognitive process that requires the modulation and control of...

, and written communication skills. The assessment consists of open-ended questions, is administered to students online, and controls for incoming academic ability. An institution's average score on the CLA measures correlates highly with the institution's average SAT

SAT

The SAT Reasoning Test is a standardized test for college admissions in the United States. The SAT is owned, published, and developed by the College Board, a nonprofit organization in the United States. It was formerly developed, published, and scored by the Educational Testing Service which still...

 score (r = 0.90). Institutional results are not published.

History and Test Format

The CLA was first launched in 2000 by the Council for Aid to Education (CAE), a national nonprofit organization based in New York City. Rather than testing for specific content knowledge gained in particular courses or majors, the intent was to assess “the collective and cumulative result of what takes place or does not take place over the four to six years of undergraduate education in and out of the classroom. Of the entire test, the most well-developed and sophisticated part is its performance task component, in which students are given ninety minutes to respond to a writing prompt that is associated with a set of background documents. The testing materials, including the documents, are accessed through a computer. The CAE has published several examples of representative performance tasks, one of which is described below (from Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses):

The “DynaTech” performance task asks students to generate a memo advising an employer about the desirability of purchasing a type of airplane that has recently crashed. Students are informed: “You are the assistant to Pat Williams, the president of DynaTech, a company that makes precision electronic instruments and navigational equipment. Sally Evans, a member of DynaTech’s sales force, recommended that DynaTech buy a small private plane (a SwiftAir 235) that she and other members of the sales force could use to visit customers. Pat was about to approve the purchase when there was an accident involving a SwiftAir 235.” Students are provided with the following set of documents for this activity: newspaper articles about the accident, a federal accident report on in-flight breakups in single engine planes, Pat Williams’s e-mail to her assistant and Sally Evans’s e-mail to Pat Williams, charts on SwiftAir’s performance characteristics, an article from Amateur Pilot magazine comparing SwiftAir 235 to similar planes, and pictures and descriptions of SwiftAir models 180 and 235. Students are then instructed to “prepare a memo that addresses several questions, including what data support or refute the claim that the type of wing on the SwiftAir 235 leads to more in-flight breakups, what other factors might have contributed to the accident and should be taken into account, and your overall recommendation about whether or not DynaTech should purchase the plane."

The CAE also publishes its scoring rubric. The design of both the prompts and the criteria for evaluation demonstrates the CLA's focus on complex, holistic, real-world problem-solving as a measurement of high level learning. As a result, the argument goes, institutions that attempt to “teach to the test” will be schools that teach students “to think critically, reason analytically, solve problems, and communicate clearly."

Criticisms

Again according to Academically Adrift, there are four primary criticisms of the CLA:

1. The first is an aversion to standardized testing in general and a belief that there is accountability in higher education due to market forces. That is, if students were not gaining something through education then they would not be paying for it. In this case, the CLA is a waste of time and money.
2. By focusing on general skills rather than concrete knowledge and specialization, some critics argue that there is real learning taking place that the CLA does not pick up.
3. Others have questioned the instrumental validity of the test, although some of these concerns have now been addressed by a 2009 test validity study organized by the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE). The results showed that while these tests should not be used as a basis to make institutional decisions about students as individuals (e.g., promotion or course placement), when aggregated in larger samples they can provide reliable estimates of institutional or group-level differences in performance on these tasks.
4. The fourth criticism is not targeted against the test itself but rather against the idea that you can measure the value-added from higher education, when so much of what students gain from college is outside of academics.

See also

Voluntary System of Assessment--an initiative developed by American Association of State Colleges and Universities

American Association of State Colleges and Universities

The American Association of State Colleges and Universities is an organization of state-supported colleges and universities that offer degree programs leading to bachelor's, master's or doctoral degrees...

 (AASCU) and the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASULGC) for 4-year public colleges and universities. The VSA endorses the use of the CLA for reporting out student learning outcomes through the College Portrait.