Improving Quality in American Higher Education: Learning Outcomes and Assessments for the 21st Century by Jillian Kinzie (review)

Quality in the undergraduate experience is a chief concern of 21st-century higher education. Federal and state policymakers, employers, parents, and the public have all complained that college is not worth the price and worse, that students are ill-prepared for the world of work upon graduation. These critiques, along with data showing lagging completion rates, have helped usher in expanded institutional assessment projects, greater accountability for student outcomes, the adoption of performance indicator systems, and a range of educational improvement initiatives (Kuh et al., 2015). Learning outcomes have recently become the center of the debate.

Amid the public conversation about the cost, value, and outcome of undergraduate education, the Social Science Research Council sponsored the Measuring College Learning (MCL) project to define essential learning outcomes and explore the results of collegiate instruction by measuring the essential concepts and competencies that graduates must attain to achieve lasting success. Departing from outcomes assessments that rely on external accountability measures, such as loan default rates, this project focused on insights from faculty about outcomes in particular fields of study. The MCL research documented in Improving Quality in American Higher Education: Learning Outcomes and Assessments for the 21st Century presents a discipline-specific vision of assessment that incorporates faculty voices from six fields: biology, business, communication, economics, history, and sociology. It also features critical commentary on the disciplinary approach from some of the leading scholars in learning outcomes assessment.

In chapter 1, “Defining and Assessing Learning in Higher Education,” the MCL project leads, Josipa Roksa, Richard Arum, and Amanda Cook, provide an insightful synthesis of critiques about undergraduate education and student outcomes and an overview of the MCL project principles and activities. The authors present the purpose of the project by pointing out that faculty are the most notable voice missing from debates about student learning and that measures of discipline-specific learning are either nonexistent or lacking. They also emphasize the importance of affording students from all backgrounds and institution attended equal opportunities to demonstrate their knowledge and skills. By making the case that faculty should be leading the way when it comes to defining and measuring what students should be learning, the authors explain the benefits of disciplinary measures of learning for larger-scale, learning-centered transfer articulation agreements and as a way for students to demonstrate their proficiencies to employers and for employers to recognize capable candidates.

Relying on faculty who are leading efforts to measure learning in their disciplines and the learning outcomes work undertaken in some disciplines, such as biology, the MCL project members invited the articulation of the top disciplinary priorities for student learning into essential concepts and competencies. Accordingly, faculty authors from six disciplines followed a common format to present a focused exploration of measuring college learning in chapters 2 through 7. Lendol Calder and Tracy Steffes begin the disciplinary discussion in chapter 2 by focusing on learning outcomes in history. They articulate essential concepts that focus on thinking like a historian, while their competencies emphasize specific skills historians practice. The chapter closes with some creative ideas about discipline-specific standardized measures of historical thinking and authentic assessments such as the creation of a virtual archive or a historical simulation. A framework for measuring learning in economics is presented by Sam Allgood and Amanda Beyer in chapter 3. Essential concepts in economics are presented as a logical progression from individual decision-making to markets, the government, and other organizations, and then the authors advocate for open-ended tasks that afford students opportunities to demonstrate higher-order skills. Importantly, the authors argue that economists have paid too little attention to teaching and that the proposed framework will help with instructional improvements and course redesign efforts.

In chapter 4, Susan Ferguson and William Carbonaro offer a view of student learning outcomes and measurement in sociology framed around a...