In higher education in the United States, teaching and research in the fields of language and literature are in a desperate condition. Laboring on the age-old axiom "publish-or-perish," thousands of professors, lecturers, and graduate students are busy producing dissertations, books, essays, and reviews. Over the past five decades, their…

As many as four-fifths of high-school graduates will need some form of postsecondary education if they are to become self-sufficient and the nation is to remain economically competitive. At the same time, policy makers, business leaders, and national study groups say the quality of student learning is subpar and want measures of institutional and…

Faculty and administrators are more likely to take responsibility for student learning and development if they believe that assessment data represent their students and identify specific actions for improvement. An earlier study found that NSSE scalelets provide dependable metrics for assessing student engagement at the university, college, and…