by John Marcus, Hechinger Report
“When you look at college mission statements, they’re loaded with grand pronouncements about the skills and habits of mind they’re going to inspire in their students,” said Alexander McCormick, an associate professor of educational leadership and policy studies at Indiana University Bloomington. Yet “even as they teach their students to back up their claims with evidence, they don’t have much evidence to back up those claims.” “What students are supposed to be doing or learning diverges wildly,” said Nate Johnson, founder and principal consultant of the firm Postsecondary Analytics, who follows this. “You have students majoring in everything from philosophy to heating and air-conditioning repair to accounting. Even if you had measurable assessments in all those different areas, adding them up to say students made X amount of progress isn’t the same as what you can say about 9-year-olds or 10-year-olds hitting certain benchmarks in reading.”
Share on FacebookAs students return to college, a basic question persists: What are they learning?