As part of its Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded Future of Scholarly Communication Project, the Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE) has hosted two meetings to explore how peer review relates to scholarly communication and academic values. In preparation for an April 2010 workshop, four working papers were developed and circulated. They are presented as drafts here. (The proceedings from the April 2010 meeting will be published at a future date.) The topics covered include assessing the myriad forms peer review takes in the academy, which forms of peer review are used for...
The assertion that there are a limited set of generalizable good educational practices (Chickering & Gamson, 1987) with a common model of preferred active student engagement in learning (Kuh, 2001) is appealing to those responsible for simply stated institutional outcomes and to the faculty who teach in fields that espouse the same practices and outcomes (Braxton, 1998). After all, if they are wrong and educational experience and good educational practices differ in important, substantive, and replicable ways by area of academic major, then assessment, accountability, administration,...
Throughout the world, interest in gauging learning outcomes at all levels of education has grown considerably over the past decade. In higher education, measuring “learning outcomes” is viewed by many stakeholders as a relatively new method to judge the “value added” of colleges and universities. The potential to accurately measure learning gains is also viewed as a diagnostic tool for institutional self-improvement. This essay compares the methodology and potential uses of three tools for measuring learning outcomes: the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), the National Survey of...
This timely report focuses on accountability -- the current lingua franca of higher education -- and the question of the public trust as a reflection of the respect and confidence of the people that are served by the nation's colleges and universities. Designed to assist policymakers and educational leaders, the report identifies the components of a state-level higher education accountability system: acting on a public agenda, maintaining the public trust of the people served by higher education,...
Validity researchers typically work with nonrandom samples, membership in which depends in part on the exam score being investigated. In a study of the SAT's validity for freshman GPA at a particular college, for example, FGPA is not observed for the entire pool of potential applicants, but only for those who are admitted and enroll. This sample selection biases validity estimates. Corrections for restriction of range remedy the problem only when the exam score is the sole determinant of selection, and even then do not permit consistent estimation of the exam's incremental validity....
The University of California at Berkeley now delivers more to the public of California than it ever has, and it does this on the basis of proportionally less funding by the State government than it has ever received. This claim may come as a surprise, since it is often said that Berkeley is in the process of privatizing, becoming less of a public university and more in the service of private interests. To the contrary, as the State’s commitment to higher education and social-welfare programs has declined, UC Berkeley has struggled to preserve and even expand its public role, while...
Igor Chirikov is the Director of the Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) Consortium and Senior Researcher at CSHE. SERU Consortium is an academic and policy research collaboration based at Center for Studies in Higher Education at the UC Berkeley working in partnership with Etio and member universities. The Consortium is a group of leading research-intensive universities that increase student success by generating and analyzing comparative data on the student experience.
As SERU Consortium Director Igor Chirikov has broad responsibilities for overall SERU Consortium...
John Aubrey Douglass is Senior Research Fellow -- Public Policy and Higher Education at the Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE) at the University of California - Berkeley. He is the author of Neo-Nationalism and Universities (Johns Hopkins Univeristy Press 2021), Envisioning the Asian...
Many small private liberal arts colleges struggle to make their enrollment targets, while many public universities cannot meet enrollment demand. Thinking creatively about collaboration between these kinds of institutions might increase the capacity of our higher education system. This essay explores models by which we might do so.
Universities are undergoing historic change, from the sharp downward shift in government funding to widespread demands to document performance. At the University of California Berkeley, this led to an operational change effort unlike any the university had ever attempted, dubbed Operational Excellence. The authors describe their experiences designing and leading this change effort, with emphasis on practical advice for similar efforts at other universities.
