Here’s a novel idea: What if institutions of higher learning decided to measure what their students learn and how that learning translates into career success, and then make that data widely available, so that potential students can assess which programs are the best-suited to help them achieve their career goals?

Here’s what’s even more novel: Someone is actually doing this.

In an article by Dan Carnevale in the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Today’s News (10.23.07)*, it was reported that a group of 10 institutions that mainly provide distance education for adults, including Capella and Kaplan, have formed an organization called the Presidents’ Forum. The Forum’s goal is to measure, program by program, what students are learning, what professional skills each institution’s programs provide, and what levels of career success are reached by programs’ graduates. The data will be used to generate widely disseminated reports, starting in 2009.

The common sense, student-oriented approach taken by the Presidents’ Forum is a sensible, stand-up affirmation of what institutions should be doing to ensure that they are providing quality education that meets the goals, needs, and expectations of its stakeholders.

Research universities should take note of this note-worthy step and walk into the sunshine with the online institutions in the Presidents’ Forum, instead of continuing their general practices of institutional research. These outdated practices dance around the accountability issue and don’t tell students what they want to know—how will you educate me and what might my future hold as a result of what I learn?

*Note that this link will only work if you are a Chronicle subscriber. If you are not, try this link, which should have a shelf-life of 5 days after this post appears.

The YouTube video by Michael L. Wesch and his Introduction to Cultural Anthropology class at Kansas State University (as it appears in the October 17, 2007 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education: The Wired Campus) presents a compelling, provocative image of how US higher education is failing its 21st century customer, Generation Y-ired. As sobering as this video is, I’m convinced that if an analogous film were made in an introductory science class, the message conveyed by the students would be even more distressing.

Why is this view distressing? Its’ because our nation is in a science education crisis, with many of the best and brightest pursuing other professions, which over the long-term will erode the US’s global scientific competitiveness. The academy’s science learning crisis is rooted in the disproportionate value placed on faculty research productivity, increasingly limited resources, conservative, risk-averse leadership, and most significantly, academe’s residents’ refusal to evolve a 19th century culture to a 21st century learning enterprise.

I believe Wesch’s students held up for us the solutions to our dilemma. First, we must understand who Generation Y-ired is and with this knowledge integrate technology, associated new pedagogies, and relevance to their lives to get their interest and thus guide their learning beyond the classroom. A change in the faculty reward system will help address fiscal constraints, and innovative leadership will set the stage for broad long-term change.

What do you think about Wesch’s video? What does it convey to us about how we need to teach science today and in the future?

Twice in recent months I’ve reviewed assessment data generated by college science teachers regarding curriculum developed by the teachers. While I’m always pleased that curriculum developers actually assess the learning gains that correlate with use of new curriculum, in both of these cases, the developers touted “improvements” in student learning that disturbed me.

This is how both studies were designed: students took a knowledge pre-test prior to using the curriculum material, and, after experiencing the curriculum, took a post-test that was slightly different from the pre-test, yet was designed to test the same concepts as those included in both the pre-test and the curriculum.

Pre-test data in both cases indicated that students, on average, knew about 30% of the material. Great, I thought—we’ve got some students who are sorely lacking in a content area, and now we’ve got some curriculum to deal with that!

But here’s the rub: After completing the curricular materials, the students, on average, only scored a 50% on the post-test. And what gets ready weird is that in both of the analyses, my colleagues touted the 20% “improvement” and chose not to comment on the fact that after sitting through a lesson/program/module, students were only grasping 50% of what the developer considered key content!

I’m all for new curriculum, and honestly assessing how the curriculum improves student learning is a great step. But, as science educators, let’s be honest in analyzing exactly what constitutes an “improvement” in learning.

There’s an article in yesterday’s Raleigh News and Observer regarding how North Carolina high school students performed on the ACT exam in 2007.

The good news is that the average composite ACT score of North Carolina students is increasing (although the increase from 20.5 to 21 strikes me as unlikely to be statistically significant, but that’s a subject for another day). This news is so good, in fact, that it makes the lead paragraph of the story.

Here’s the shockingly bad news, which requires that one read on into the twelfth paragraph of the article: Only 28 percent of the test-takers in NC met the test administrators’ benchmark score for college-readiness in science. And only 23 percent met the benchmark score for a range of core college courses.

And for even more bad news, skip on down to the very last and sixteenth paragraph, where we’re told that average composite scores for black students and Hispanic students, already lower than those for their white peers, dropped this year.

The article leaves me with a lot of questions, relating to what kinds of students take the ACT, how they stack up against those who take the SAT, and how many of these ACT test-takers are likely to be admitted to college with these scores.

The biggest question, though, is how 3 out of 4 students—albeit those in a self-selected population of ACT test-takers—can sit through 12 years of education and not know enough to be ready for the next step?