Real-Time Student Assessment

Meeting the Imperative for Improved Time to Degree, Closing the Opportunity Gap, and Assuring Student Competencies for 21st-Century Needs

Peggy L. Maki

• Publisher: Stylus Publishing
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781620364901
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Istruzione superiore

This book challenges institutions and their programs to prioritize the use of chronological assessment results to benefit enrolled students in comparison with the more common practice of prolonged assessment cycles that generally benefit future students. Peggy Maki advocates for real-time assessment processes to identify patterns of underperformance and obstacles that require timely interventions for enrolled students to succeed. In tandem with the sets of educational practices and policies that many institutions have now undertaken to close achievement and graduation rates across our diverse student demographics, such as developing clear degree pathways, she calls on all higher education providers – if they are to remain relevant and meet their social purpose in our complex world – to urgently recalibrate their assessment processes to focus on currently enrolled students' progress towards achieving a high-quality degree, regardless of when they matriculate or re-enter higher education. She demonstrates that we already have sufficient examples and evidence to implement real-time assessment of students as they progress through their studies. She draws on the practices of specialized accredited programs, such as those in the professions that assess in real time; on the experiences of institutions that have adopted competency-based education; and on the affordances of technologies that now provide faculty and students with up-to-the-minute diagnostics. She identifies the six principles necessary to implement a real-time assessment process, illustrated by case studies of how campuses have operationalized them to advance students' equitable progress towards achieving a high-quality degree; and demonstrates the benefits of real-time assessment compared to more future-oriented processes, among which is engaging students in reflecting on their own progress along their degree pathways.She advocates for the use of well documented national outcomes-based frameworks such as Liberal Education and America's Promise (LEAP), its aligned Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education scoring rubrics ( VALUE), the Degree Qualifications Profile, and discipline-based outcomes assessments to ensure high-quality degrees that meet well-defined standards and criteria. She also identifies how data systems and technological developments help to monitor closely and respond in time to students' patterns of underperformance.The book is an urgent call for higher education to achieve the values of equity, transparency and quality it espouses; and ensure that all students graduate in a timely fashion with the competencies they need to be active and productive citizens.

1

CURRENT AND PROJECTED STUDENT DEMOGRAPHICS

Why Equity Matters Now for Individuals and the Nation

Broadening access to postsecondary education to students who reflect our national demographics and focusing on all students’ persistence toward attaining a high-quality degree have received national attention in this century. A chorus consisting of federal and state officials, policy-makers, researchers on student demographics, employers, higher education organizations, and major higher education funders—such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Lumina Foundation—has sustained that attention. Two lead voices in that chorus have been (a) President Barack Obama in his 2009 Address to the Joint Session of Congress, calling for Americans to reach the world’s highest rate of college completion by 2020, and (b) the Lumina Foundation, establishing a goal for increasing the proportion of Americans with quality postsecondary degrees, certificates, and other credentials to 60% by 2025 (Lumina Foundation, 2015; White House, 2009). These goals prioritize our nation’s pressing need for an educated citizenry that reflects our national demographics—one that contributes to our country’s overall societal health and well-being as well as to its economic prosperity in a rapidly changing and globally interconnected world. Within this context, this first chapter makes the following two-part case for why our colleges and universities need to develop a real-time student assessment commitment that continuously improves and, thus, equitably advances all currently enrolled students to achieve a high-quality degree:

•disparities in achievement levels, persistence rates, and graduation rates across our student demographics documented in longitudinally reported national data; and

•national need for more college graduates across our student demographics to contribute to American society at large, to the 21st-century workforce and the demands of globalization, and to students’ and their families’ social and financial mobility.

Disparities in Achievement Levels, Persistence Rates, and Graduation Rates Across Our Student Demographics: An Overview

Preparing an educated citizenry has been American higher education’s historic role, enabling individuals to live fulfilled lives and contribute to the complex and changing civic, social, and economic needs of our nation. Higher percentages of our college-going students reflect and are projected to reflect the diversity of our national demographics. Writing in 2010 about demographic, social, and economic trends in the United States and internationally, Joel Kotkin projected how some of our nation’s population percentages will shift by 2050:

Whites will no longer be the majority. The minority population, currently 30 percent, is expected to exceed 50 percent before 2050. No other advanced populous country will see such diversity.

In fact, most of America’s net population growth will be among its minorities, as well as in a growing mixed-race population. Latino and Asian populations are expected to nearly triple, and the children of immigrants will become more prominent. Today in the United States, 25 percent of children under age 5 are Hispanic; by 2050, that percentage will be almost 40 percent. (p. 2)

Our higher education student demographics increasingly reflect this population shift. At the same time, many students across this diverse population face personal and academic challenges. These kinds of obstacles may, for example, impede historically underrepresented students’ abilities to persist and achieve a postsecondary degree, contributing to gaps in degree attainment compared with their White and Asian counterparts. Yet, graduating measurably larger percentages of historically underrepresented students remains our current challenge. They represent our immediate and future educated citizenry, the voices of our democracy, and a major source of our workforce. Demographic descriptors provide lenses through which to develop a more granular and dimensional view of who our growing student populations are. In addition to students’ race and ethnicity, other major descriptors include students’ generation status, nativity (origin of birth), socioeconomic status, and age.

Race and Ethnicity

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) identifies the span from 1980 to 2008 as the period during which the racial/ethnic composition of our student bodies shifted. According to its 2010 report,

Between 1998 and 2008, the racial/ethnic composition of the United States shifted—the White population declined from 80 percent of the total population to 66 percent; the Hispanic population increased from 6 percent of the total to 15 percent; the Black population remained at about 12 percent; and the Asian/Pacific Islander population increased from less than 2 percent of the total population to 4 percent. In 2008, American Indians/Alaska Natives made up about 1 percent and people of two or more races made up about 1 percent of the population. (p. iii)

Based on NCES’s actual and projected number of student enrollments in colleges and universities from fall 1996 through fall 2027, based on race/ ethnicity, Hussar and Bailey (2011) project the highest percentage of enrollment growth in Black and Hispanic students over the years 2011 to 2022:

•7 percent increase in enrollment for White students,

•7 percent for students who are Asian/Pacific Islander,

•26 percent increase for students who are Black,

•27 percent increase for students who are Hispanic, and

•stable enrollment of American Indian/Alaska Native. (p. 3)

Longer-term perspectives on continuing diversification are substantiated by demographic data that chart the actual and projected race/ethnicity of high school students. The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) has been producing high school population forecasts for over 30 years. In its publication Knocking at the College Door: Projections of High School Graduates, Prescott and Bransberger (2012) forecast the growth of minority high school students through the 2024–2025 academic year, based on preceding years’ documented numbers. In particular, Hispanic students will continue to represent the largest proportion of minority students, followed by Black, Asian, Pacific Islander, and American Indian/Alaska Native students. Table 1.1 illustrates the projected racial/ethnic high school enrollments from 2016 and 2017 through 2024 and 2025.

TABLE 1.1
U.S. Public High School Enrollment (Grades 9–12) by Race/Ethnicity

Academic Year	American Indian/Alaska Native	Asian/Pacific Islander	Black, Non-Hispanic	Hispanic	White, Non-Hispanic
2016–2017	181,220	906,630	2,342,617	3,651,757	7,883,751
2017–2018	182,266	944,016	2,320,678	3,752,434	7,840,129
2018–2019	183,841	974,058	2,290,146	3,843,745	7,784,370
2019–2020	188,725	1,006,005	2,286,569	3,966,914	7,696,206
2020–2021	195,390	1,042,209	2,332,654	4,130,834	7,669,705
2021–2022	202,291	1,081,178	2,391,294	4,280,551	7,641,403
2022–2023	207,804	1,110,829	2,442,290	4,371,350	7,582,449
2023–2024	208,826	1,133,428	2,459,086	4,362,706	7,517,304
2024–2025	205,657	1,140,483	2,426,542	4,248,975	7,389,783

Source. Prescott & Bransberger, 2012, p. 32. Used with permission from WICHE.

Based on their high school projections, Prescott and Bransberger (2013) conclude that the public graduating high school classes are “inching ever closer to becoming ‘majority-minority,’ in which no single race/ethnicity accounts for 50 percent of the total” (pp. 1–2).

Of national importance are longitudinal data that report persistent six-year graduation gaps between White and Asian students and their Black, Hispanic, Pacific Islander, and American Indian/Alaska Native counterparts. These data are based on first-time, full-time student enrollments, generally representing traditional-age students. An NCES (2013) report on increased numbers of students entering four-year institutions across racial/ethnic lines in 2005 (the first year that a percentage for Pacific Islander students was reported by NCES) and graduating six years later concluded that

Asian students again showed the highest six-year graduation rates, followed by White student graduation rates.

•69 percent of Asian students

•62 percent of White students

•51 percent of Hispanic students

•49 percent of Pacific Islander students

•40 percent of Black students

•40 percent of American Indian/Alaska Native students

Six-year graduation rates for students entering four-year institutions two years later in 2007 remain similar to those for students who entered in 2005 (NCES, 2015).

Two recent Education Trust reports, issued in 2015 and 2016, focus on the good news and not-so-good news about underrepresented students’ graduation rates at public four-year institutions, the sector that enrolls more than two-thirds of undergraduate students. Eberle-Sudre, Welch, and Nichols (2015) analyzed graduation rates at 255 public institutions that reported overall graduation rate increases in graduation cohorts that had at least 50 minority and 50 White students in them over the 2003–2013 period. Although graduation rates increased for minorities at these institutions, “the completion gap narrowed by slightly more than half a percentage point (0.6), leaving a 14-point completion gap” (p. 2). More recently, Nichols, Eberle-Sudre, and Welch (2016) examined graduation rates across specific underrepresented groups during that same 10-year span. They concluded that at four-year public institutions across the country, “graduation rates for Black students have not improved as much as those of White students” (p. 1). Targeting 232 public four-year institutions that reported increases in graduation rates, these authors found that Latino and Native students actually made more progress toward graduation than their White peers, whereas Black students “made less progress” (p. 1).

Disparities also exist between male and female students across all racial/ ethnic groups. According to NCES’s Higher Education: Gaps in Access and Persistence Study (2012), persistence and graduation rate disparities exist between the educational attainment of male and female students. Among first-time students seeking bachelor’s degrees who started full-time at a four-year college in 2004, a higher percentage of females than males completed those degrees within six years (61% versus 56%). This pattern held across all racial/ethnic groups, although the gap was widest between Black females and males (9 percentage points; p. xv).

The fastest-growing minority population...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Current and Projected Student Demographics
• 2. Outcomes-Based Frameworks
• 3. The Canvas of Core Learner-Centered Commitments that Stretches Across an Outcomes-Based Framework
• 4. Guiding Principles of Real-Time Student Assessment at the Institution and Program Levels
• 5. Technology That Contributes to Real-Time Student Assessment
• 6. Approaches to Taking Real-Time Student Assessment to Scale
• References
• Index
• Also available from Stylus