Bill’s Posts | Slover Linett Strategies

The rap on research for the arts, museums, and education

June 24, 2011 by Bill

The recent, gloomy book about our higher education system, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, has sparked much debate. So has a documentary about high school students desperate to get into good colleges, Race to Nowhere. Put the two together and it starts to look like young people are stressing out and over-achieving in high school to get into the right universities, then not learning much when they get there. Is that true, and if so, how did we get here?

At first, what struck me about the book and the movie was how differently they see the situation. Academically Adrift, a rigorous sociological study written by Richard Arum of NYU and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia, assesses the “value added” by undergraduate education in America — in other words, learning outcomes. The story is not a happy one. Based on results from the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), a standardized national instrument designed to measure critical thinking, the authors find that many of our college students have experienced little in the way of measurable learning during their undergrad years. To be specific, almost half of students (45%) showed no significant improvement on the CLA. Not exactly a passing grade for American higher education.

(Whether the CLA actually measures this accurately is a question unto itself. For the moment, let’s take it at face value and assume it does a decent job of assessing critical thinking, analytical reasoning, problem solving, writing, and other skills we want our colleges to teach.)

Then there’s the Race to Nowhere phenomenon. The film, co-directed by Vicki Abeles and Jessica Congdon, has garnered attention through grassroots distribution: screenings at schools followed by discussions among parents and teachers. That’s how I saw it recently at the school one of my children attends. The film tells the stories of high-schoolers pushed to the brink, working extremely hard, anxious about getting into the best colleges, depressed, and eventually burned out.

These kids are many things, but they are not “academically adrift.” They’re learning plenty. But they’re also paying the price for those achievements in areas like health, happiness, and quality of life. They are driven simultaneously to academic success and emotional collapse.

Now, these are highly motivated, high-achieving students; obviously they don’t represent the full range of high schoolers in America. But with more prospects applying to a greater number of highly selective colleges each year, those colleges are becoming even more selective, and the race is only heating up. Race to Nowhere is a sobering look at an important and growing part of the higher ed ecosystem.

So the book and the film tell very different stories, and the two seem to be in tension with each other. Take the issue of homework (as they call it in high school) and time spent studying (in college). The authors of Academically Adrift noted in a New York Times op-ed that the average college student spends only 12 to 13 hours per week studying, about half of what she spent in 1960. In contrast, the question in high school circles is how to stem the rising tide of homework and give students their lives back a little. Another recent Times article cited Race to Nowhere as one of the catalysts for new policies by school districts to limit the time that students spend on homework. In the film, and in the discussions sparked by it among parents, it’s clear that many grade school and high school students are spending hours every night on homework.

So is the problem too little studying or too much? How can students be spending more time studying in high school than they do in college? And what’s the relationship between the two? ...

Full Post »
Categories: Accountability, Assessment, College admissions & marketing, Higher ed, Learning, Student research
Comments (1) :: Share This

February 28, 2011 by Bill

The debate over standardized test scores in college admissions is heating up in our own backyard. A few weeks ago, DePaul University announced it will no longer require undergraduate applicants to submit standardized test scores. Why not? Because the admissions office found that the scores added little to their ability to predict applicants’ academic success in college. And DePaul isn’t alone.

What does help predict academic performance, not surprisingly, are the applicants’ high school grades. The past is prologue, as Shakespeare put it. So DePaul has joined a growing group of colleges and universities, now in the hundreds, that have recognized the limits of standardized tests in the admissions process (see Fairtest.org for a list of schools that have made them optional or no longer consider them at all).

But, as others have argued, high school grades are not standardized: they differ from teacher to teacher and school to school, and they may be influenced by all kinds of cultural and environmental factors other than the student’s raw potential. So they’re not an ideal basis for comparison, especially when it comes to large applicant pools from different geographies and diverse circumstances.

Isn’t it better to rely on “standardized” tests, which are the same everywhere and for everyone? Aren’t SAT scores more, not less necessary to differentiate applicants in an era when grade inflation is making high school transcripts look increasingly alike? We live in a world that loves the single score, index, or metric that boils it all down for us. Standardized test scores lend some objectivity to the otherwise messy, subjective process of college admissions.

The trouble is, it’s not clear what tests like the SATs actually measure. Intelligence? Most psychologists would say they don’t measure innate intelligence or aptitude, or even academic potential; they measure developed abilities, and only certain abilities at that. Of course, the development of those abilities in any given individual is influenced by a host of environmental factors, including the hugely influential factors of race and class. ...

Full Post »
Categories: College admissions & marketing, Diversity, Higher ed
Comments (1) :: Share This

August 06, 2010 by Bill

NPR has been no slouch when it comes to social networking and now has more than a million Facebook fans. It recently surveyed that population, and the findings raise a question that has me and my colleagues wondering: how segmented is the social media audience by platform?

Social networking is on our minds quite a bit these days at Slover Linett, and not just in my own domain, higher ed. As many of you know, our collaborative study with CASE and mStoner looked at how colleges and universities are using social media for fundraising and alumni relations. Cheryl presented initial findings in New York and the research was written up in the Huffington Post, Inside Higher Ed, and elsewhere. And we’re conducting several surveys to help performing arts organizations understand how their audiences are using interactive technologies to connect with the institution and engage with the art form.

So the new NPR study caught my eye, and based on the 9 slides that their in-house research group has shared publicly, it looks like wonderful work. Some of the findings were a little surprising to me (which I always enjoy — surprises in research reports are like plot twists in a mystery novel). Perhaps the most interesting surprise was the apparent lack of overlap between NPR’s Facebook fans and its Twitter followers.

Only about 8% of the Facebook fans who participated in the survey say they also follow NPR on Twitter. Yet NPR has well over two million Twitter followers (the numbers are complicated because different departments and on-air personalities have their own Twitter accounts; NPR Politics has 1.8 million followers, and Weekend Edition host Scott Simon has 1.3 million).

So clearly there are plenty of NPR Facebook fans who aren’t following the organization on Twitter, and vice versa. NPR researchers Andy Carvin and Noel Cody, who posted the results I just linked to in NPR's research blog, were also surprised by this and note that the two communities appear to be more mutually exclusive than they thought. ...

Full Post »
Categories: College admissions & marketing, Higher ed, Museums, Other nonprofits, Performing arts, Research findings, Social media, Survey research
Comment :: Share This

July 23, 2010 by Bill

Our recent study on social media usage by colleges and universities has been generating conversation, predictably enough given the hot topic. But what’s the real revolution that’s occurring? It has to do with who’s communicating with whom.

Our study for the Council on Advancement and Support of Education (CASE), which we undertook in partnership with mStoner, was designed to give university development, alumni relations, and marketing professionals insights into what their peers are doing with social media, and why. We found that the biggest reason schools are investing time and money in social media is because their alumni (and other constituents) want them to. It’s expected, and it’s how an increasing proportion of alumni want to communicate with their alma mater.

No surprise there. And another recent piece of research amplifies this point. The U.S. News commissioned the Engagement Strategies Group to survey alumni around the country and learned that 47% of young alumni don’t feel their colleges do enough to connect with them, other than soliciting donations. So alumni want their schools to take a more active role in forging those relationships. That doesn’t mean more communication, of course. It means better communication.

Which brings us right back to social media, because Facebook, Twitter, and other network-driven communication platforms aren’t just new channels to carry the university’s message to alumni (or prospective or current students). They’re not even merely two-way streets: they’re whole neighborhoods of “streets,” new communities of information and exchange.

A slide from our presentation at the CASE Summit for Advancement Leaders, 2010. ...

Full Post »
Categories: Higher ed, Social media
Comment :: Share This

January 15, 2010 by Bill

Social media is playing an increasing role in all kinds of decisions, from tonight’s movie to tomorrow’s career switch. How will it change the college choice game?

We largely understand the decision about what college to attend as a matter of finding the right “fit.” Which college represents the best alignment between the student’s values, interests, and personality and the university’s academic programs, reputation, student life, cost, and other factors? In the end, a prospect must “feel right” about the college they choose. Some have even suggested that the process is similar to choosing a romantic partner. We say that young people “fall in love” with the college of their choice.

Well, social media is certainly playing a role in romantic matchmaking. What about finding that special college?

Let’s put this into context. How prospective students gather information to find that “good fit” has changed dramatically since I was a prospect more than thirty years ago. In those days the information and advice came from a narrow range of experts: the guidance counselors in your school and whatever catalogues and directories happened to be on hand at the resource center. There were a few books on college admissions, but not many. No national rankings yet. Conversations with peers and perhaps other friends and family members were important, and noting where those others were going, or had gone, to college had an impact. But overall, the people who had an impact on your choice came from within a small, geographically-defined circle.

Full Post »
Categories: College admissions & marketing, Higher ed, Social media
Comment :: Share This

December 30, 2009 by Bill

I was recently asked by a colleague of mine to guest lecture at a seminar in higher education administration that he teaches. I’ve done this before and always enjoyed it, and I like to think I have something worth sharing after all those years in institutional research (including my recent experience on the consulting side). His students are refreshingly idealistic: they really aspire to have an impact on the way higher education works and how it benefits society.

But they often also have a big impact on me. That was the case in my most recent experience.

During the seminar, we discussed the various accountability efforts that are currently underway in higher ed, such as the College Portrait component of the Voluntary System of Accountability (VSA) effort at land-grant colleges and universities, and the University and College Accountability Network (U-CAN) among independent colleges and universities.

Full Post »
Categories: Assessment, Higher ed, Learning, Student research
Comments (1) :: Share This

About Us

About this Blog

Categories

Blogs we love

Most Popular Posts