Learning & Assessment

Obama administration continues to turn up pressure on accreditors, promising in new letter to measure the agencies against their peers and urging more focus on student achievement and troubled colleges.

Academic studies that have been critical of state performance-based funding policies lack the data to back up their conclusions, writes Martha Snyder, and fail to account for the design and implementation of these policies.

By Martha Snyder

New volume of research examines various aspects of higher education performance, going well beyond labor market outcomes to include academic quality and socioeconomic equity.

The student learning outcomes accreditors require too often reduce learning to inane, meaningless blurbs, writes Robert Shireman, which prevent the sort of quality assurance that puts student work at the center.

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Most colleges put student work at the center of how they measure academic quality, writes Peter Ewell, who argues that abandoning student learning outcomes would be a serious mistake.

By Peter Ewell