Inside the Collegiate Learning Assessment:

The Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) is a new assessment tool which was developed by the Council for Aid to Education. It is being used across the country to measure critical thinking, quantitative reasoning and effective writing, and when administered longitudinally should be a useful value-added assessment tool. Three of the four schools in the CALL consortium - Carleton, Macalester and St. Olaf - chose the CLA as one of the assessment instruments they would administer as part of the Teagle grant. The budget for our grant includes funding for faculty from all four institutions to learn more about the Collegiate Learning Assessment, specifically to better understand how the CLA might be useful to improve student learning. A two-and-a-half-day workshop is being planned for mid-August 2006 that will provide up to 6 faculty members from each CALL institution with hands-on experience in completing a CLA session, evaluating students' CLA work, and considering the implications of CLA results for curriculum and pedagogy. The workshop will be designed with both CLA users and non-CLA users in mind; it is anticipated that the approach to evaluating students' work and using assessment results for institutional improvement will be useful to institutions that assess student learning in other ways.

In anticipation of this workshop, the CALL consortium is hosting Dr. Richard Hersh, Senior Fellow at the Council for Aid to Education and co-director of the Collegiate Learning Assessment, on Monday, June 12, 2006, from 9:00 am - 1 pm at Macalester College. The colloquium will be divided into two parts and will be followed by lunch. All CALL faculty are invited to both parts of the colloquium, but some may prefer to attend Part I only. The tentative agenda is as follows:

9:00 - 10:30 Part I - The CLA: A Closer Look

Dr. Hersh will provide an overview of the Collegiate Learning Assessment and the four-year longitudinal project. Topics will include:

• Developments in higher education that led to the creation of the CLA

• How the CLA defines and measures the outcomes it purports to measure

• The extent to which the CLA is appropriate for assessing the outcomes of a liberal arts education

• The objectives of the four-year study using the CLA

• How CLA results can be useful to liberal arts faculty

• Answers to your additional questions about the CLA

10:45 - 12:00 Part II - Planning the August CLA workshop for CALL faculty

CALL faculty and steering committee members will work with Dr. Hersh to develop a tentative agenda for the August workshop. What do we want to learn in order to make the best use possible of the assessment results provided by the CLA and by any other tools we are using to understand student learning? This conversation will allow the August workshop to be customized to the specific interests and needs of the CALL consortium.

12.00 - 1.00 Lunch with Dr. Hersh