Informal (and sometimes formal) assessments in higher education often ask students how their skills or attitudes have changed as the result of engaging in a particular course or program; however, it is unclear to what extent these self-reports are accurate. Using a longitudinal sample of over 3,000 college students, we found that students were…

This study estimates the effects of a deep approaches to learning scale and its subscales on measures of students' critical thinking, need for cognition, and positive attitudes toward literacy, controlling for pre-college scores for the outcomes and other covariates. Results suggest reflection is critical to making gains across the outcomes.

This study investigated the relative freshman-year cognitive impacts of 2 historically black and 16 predominantly white colleges on black students. Of these institutions, 5 were 2-year institutions and the rest were 4-year colleges. The data were taken from a pool of 2,416 freshmen students who participated in the National Study of Student…