State educators skeptical of report on learning

Some members of Washington's higher-education community are skeptical — and at times dismissive — of a new report that claims students don't learn enough in college.

The study of more than 2,300 undergraduates at four-year colleges and universities across the country showed "little if any growth" during their first two years in critical thinking, complex reasoning and written communication skills.

A main point of contention lies in the study's methodology. The authors, both professors of sociology, measured learning with data from the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), a test initiated by a national nonprofit.

"The CLA is not a valid measure of college student learning," said Catharine Beyer, a research scientist in the University of Washington's office of education assessment.

The study, published Jan. 18 along with a book titled "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses," by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, focused on a performance task within the CLA that asks students to respond to a writing prompt involving a "real-world" scenario.

Beyer said that assessment is unacceptable because it's too generic and disregards a students' particular area of study.

Beyer, who directed a UW study of undergraduate learning that culminated in a 2007 book, "Inside the Undergraduate Experience," said the UW uses student learning assessments that vary within each department.

Michelle Janning, a sociology professor and assistant dean of the faculty at Whitman College, a private liberal-arts college in Walla Walla, also questioned the limitations of the CLA. She said Whitman gives seniors multiple exit surveys as an assessment of student learning, asking questions such as whether students participated in extracurricular activities and learned skills outside of the classroom. Whitman also received a grant from the Teagle Foundation to look at students' senior years and assess where there is room for improvement.

Arum, a professor at New York University who co-wrote the book with Roksa, of the University of Virginia, acknowledged that the CLA is flawed. But he said that's no reason to disregard his findings — especially considering that other studies, such as the National Survey of Student Engagement, back up his own.

Arum argues that a survey he administered to the students in his study offers further proof of the report's validity. The short survey found that in a typical semester, 32 percent of students didn't take any courses with more than 40 pages of reading per week and 50 percent didn't take a course in which they wrote more than 20 pages per semester.

"Some students are doing quite fine, but there are large pockets of kids that are not being asked to do very much," Arum said.

A. G. Rud, dean of Washington State University's College of Education, said he thought the problem of limited learning in higher education may lie within the quality of teaching.

"You can go into any college town ... and you can hear the faculty complain about how dumb college students are these days," Rud said. "You've got to ask yourself as a faculty member: How much are you complicit in that kind of atmosphere? "

Kevin Eggers, a senior and student-body president at Seattle University, a Jesuit Catholic university, said he actually owes his success to his professors but also to the extracurricular opportunities at school.

"I know at Seattle University everyone's in a club ... or helping out in the community," Eggers said. "That's a very large portion of the education that goes on."

But all students overestimate how much they've learned, Arum said. "If you don't know what you don't know, you can't answer a question on how much you think you learned," he said.

His study also found that oftentimes, extracurricular activities were not related to learning. That's not to say those activities don't teach valuable skills, Arum said, but schools shouldn't prioritize social development over academic development.

"If a large number of college students are graduating today and they are not developing higher-level skills, what does that mean for the possibility of a democratic society?" he said.

Olivia Bobrowsky: 206-464-3195 or obobrowsky@seattletimes.com