The expectation for accountability is legitimate. In order to have the desired effects, evidence of what students know and can do must respond to genuine institutional needs and priorities. Far too often, that condition is not met. On too many campuses, assessment activity is mired in a culture of compliance rather than driven by collective…

The Voluntary System of Accountability (VSA) is a vehicle for public four-year universities to report comparable information about the undergraduate student experience via the College Portrait, a common web reporting template. The National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA) was asked by the VSA to evaluate the effectiveness of the…

Worldwide, economic and other factors are pressing institutions of higher education to assess student learning to insure that graduates acquire the skills and competencies demanded in the 21st century. This paper summarises the status of undergraduate student learning outcomes assessment at accredited colleges and universities in the United…

This study examines (1) the extent to which student engagement is associated with experimental and traditional measures of academic performance, (2) whether the relationships between engagement and academic performance are conditional, and (3) whether institutions differ in terms of their ability to convert student engagement into academic…

Examines the quality of the undergraduate experience in the 1990s, using student data that spans the four decades beginning with the 1960s. Two questions are addressed: whether college students in the 1960s and 1970s gained more from their undergraduate experience than subsequent cohorts, and whether reforms are having the desired effects. Data…

The impact of out-of-class experiences on outcomes of college attendance considered important by students were studied through interviews with 149 seniors at 12 colleges and universities. Fourteen categories of learning and personal development were identified. Results demonstrate the importance of experiences beyond the classroom. (SLD)

The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) sits on the border of Mexico and the United States in the middle of the world's largest binational metropolitan region. For years, it struggled to compete with top-tier research institutions with far greater resources in a quest to become "Harvard on the Border." In the late 1980s, new president…

This review of the literature considers three issues: how out-of-class experiences of undergraduates contribute to the goals of higher education and valued outcomes; the institutional conditions that encourage students to use out-of-class time in educationally purposeful ways; and the role of all members of the campus community to foster such…

This study compared college seniors' self-evaluation of skills considered important for lifelong learning from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. The study used data from the College Student Experiences Questionnaire (CSEQ), a national database begun in 1983 which includes over 200,000 student records from over 600 colleges and universities. An index…

A study investigated indicators of student academic performance in six samples (n=911 each) of men and women students from 19 baccalaureate, 27 master's, and 29 doctoral granting institutions. Measures of achievement gains associated with three good educational practices (faculty-student contact, cooperation among students, active learning) were…