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Arum, R. And Roskia, J. (2011) Academically Adrift: limited learning on college campuses. University of Chicago Press. Chicago.
This book is based on primary research by a group of US social scientists. The central argument is that the key purpose of a higher education for students is to learn to think critically. However, the reality is that students spend less time studying at college than in high school, are strategic (taking classes which grade high), and that faculty teach and assess in ways that reduce their workload rather than in ways that encourage learning. The authors’ analysis of this current state of play is that students are not encouraged to engage in the academic side of college life. Rather, students and staff are driven by demands to publish (to gain tenure), GPA (the grade – not what is learnt) and student satisfaction ratings (what students like – not what is learnt). This analysis should raise concerns for us in the UK as we approach the year of the REF, another round of NSS league tables and some universities trial GPAs.
Arum and Roskia go on to present a picture of US colleges where students and staff do not value academic learning, and neither do their Institutions, with an increasing proportion of staff employed in professional administration and student services roles and a corresponding decrease in the proportion employed in academic roles. University managers are paid more highly than academics – an indication of their relative worth. Students and their parents, now making significant personal financial investment, and carrying burgeoning levels of debt, are concerned with the return on their investment – which they see as the services offered by their institution of choice and salaries after graduation. Students (as customers) are not prioritizing their academic needs and institutions (as providers) are not responding to students’ academic needs either:
“students as customers focus on receiving services that will allow them, as effortlessly and comfortably as possible, to attain. Valuable educational credentials that can be exchanged for later labor market success.”
The proposal is that to redress what has been presented as a fairly dire situation, institutions should be demonstrating the extent to which they value student learning. Specifically, they should be identifying the academic value of a higher education and measuring it in large, longitudinal empirical studies.
The most commonly used measure of student learning is the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). This is a questionnaire based self-report. Although this has been widely used in the US and Australia (and currently a UK version is being developed), the authors are critical of the validity of students self-reporting on what they have learnt as a proxy for student learning. They also dismiss both SATS and GPAs as unreliable measures of learning across cohorts and colleges, as they are calculated differently and often scaled locally.
The research in the book is based instead on data from 2322 student volunteers across a number of US colleges, collected over 4 years, who completed the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA). This consists of three open ended tasks: a performance task and two analytical writing tasks, designed to assess critical thinking, analytical reasoning, problem solving and writing. Most of the analysis in the book is conducted on the performance task in which students are given 90 minutes to respond to a writing prompt based on a set of background documents eg to write a memo to your employer about desirability of purchasing a type of aero plane that has recently crashed or evaluate a proposal to increase the number of police officers in an attempt to reduce drug related crime. The test and the documents are all presented on a computer. Students must how how they’ve made use of the available evidence, synthesize an argument and draw conclusions. A detailed marking rubric is available. This should then be a standardized way of testing the very thing that HE is all about.
In summary, the research found that in general gains in student learning while at college are low, although there are variations both within and across campuses and student subgroups. This means that for some students there is little if any academic benefit of a college education in the US today. The remaining chapters go on to look in detail at the performance of students with different backup grounds and the relative influence of institutional efforts to improve students’ academic success, in order to make recommendations for educational reform
What’s the relevance of this book for Brookes? Putting to one side the findings of the study, it is clear that what we choose to measure is a visible expression of what we value. We might declare the value we place on the academic side of university life by directing our attention towards students’ learning in place of satisfaction with our services. We have seen from the experience of the NSS that introducing a measure, even one with questionable validity, generates an enormous amount of energy towards its improvement. We could take this energy and direct it towards recording the distinctive outcomes of learning at Brookes. We have already agreed what we expect students to gain from studying with us in the form of the graduate attributes. Would it be feasible to develop a standard measure of achievement of one or more of the graduate attributes and use such a measure to assess the value of time at Brookes for our students? Let me know what you think.
There are two copies of Academically Adrift in the OCSLD resource collection (which is catalogued in the university library catalogue).
posted by Rhona Sharpe