College Learning Assessment Test draws criticism from AU professors

A study of over 2,300 undergraduate students from 24 different universities found that 45 percent of students show no significant improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing from the span of their freshman to sophomore years.

However, the study did show more significant improvement over four years than two.

The objective of the College Learning Assessment Test (CLA) is to measure the critical thinking and writing ability of college students. But is the CLA an accurate representation of what it is trying to assess?

Findings in Richard Roksa and Josipa Arum’s study also found that half of students did not take a single course requiring 20 pages of writing during the prior semester and one-third did not take a single course requiring 40 pages of reading per week.

Chad Harriss, assistant professor of media studies at AU, asked the question “40 pages of what?”

“Reading is happening, but whether or not it’s the right reading is the question.”

Professors can assign 40-plus pages of reading a week, but how much would be gained, Harriss joked, if he were to assign 40 pages of comic books a week?

Last year, Alfred University administered the CLA test to first year students in the CLAS First Year Experience program, students taking “Foundations” in the art school, and first years in Business and Engineering seminars in their respective schools. Faculty then encouraged seniors to take the test as well in order to provide a potential comparison. According to senior English majors, the CLA required them to choose one of two topics and attempt to “create” a compelling argument for or against it without having any facts or research at their disposal.

Students claimed “it is not what we are trained to do.”

Another glaring flaw is motivation. How do you get a student to care about taking a long, challenging standardized test that has no outcome on their future career or college GPA? The CLA is not graded and students admitted, between length and lack of purpose, that it was easy to grow lethargic during the test.

Like the high school Regents exams or the SATs and GREs, professors and students alike are becoming more and more concerned with the results of standardized tests to measure collective knowledge. “Teaching to the test” is becoming a popular trend in high schools and colleges across America.

“But teaching to the test works if you are teaching to the right test,” Nancy Furlong associate professor of psychology and chair of the psychology department at AU, stated, but is the CLA the “right test?”

Gordon Atlas, professor of psychology and head of the honors program at AU, does not seem to think so. According to Atlas, the term “college learning” is quite arbitrary and the definition Arum and Roksa have come up with seem to neglect the idea of student focus on a particular discipline.

“This assessment tool, the CLA, is a general one so that it assess only general improvement in cognitive functioning, which would not be expected to change dramatically over a short (or even three plus year) period,” Atlas conjectured via email.

The research fails to acknowledge the great deal of learning that occurs within specific majors. This concept is not being addressed. The fact remains that chemistry majors are learning a lot about chemistry or psychology students are learning a lot about psychology.

Consequently, when the authors report “students are not learning very much in college,” the lack of inclusion of specific discipline learning skews the data to benefit the hypothesis of the researcher.

In addition, no research has been done on the critical thinking and cognitive skills of people who did not go to college. There is no comparison to college students of the '80s or '90s, but an implication that the “old ways” are superior. Because of a lack of previous research done on the topic, it is impossible to tell if the changes found in the study are less substantial.