UNIVERSITY TRIES TO GAUGE STUDENT WORK

As director of assessment at Southeast Missouri State University, Pauline Fox spends a lot of time documenting how well students learn.

Since 1987, the university has attempted to measure student learning through various national achievement tests.

The university focuses a lot of attention on academic assessments. Fox's office of assessment operates on a $21,000 budget, not counting personnel costs.

But many of the university's assessment costs are spread out among department and college budgets.

In all, university officials estimate, Southeast spends from $50,000 to $100,000 a year on assessing student learning.

Fox said some assessment has occurred in various academic departments for years, but a university-wide assessment plan was only implemented five years ago. It is scheduled to be reviewed by a campus committee this year.

And it wasn't until the fall of 1990 that the university established a director of assessment position and gave those duties to Fox, who is from the economics department faculty.

"There is a national move toward increasing formal assessment efforts," she said.

In an era of tight state budgets and rising tuition costs, parents, taxpayers and the public in general want to know how well colleges and universities are doing in educating students.

"Part of it is that the public wants information about how well students in college are doing," said Fox.

The public, she said, wants to see some evidence of student learning beyond just that of classroom grades.

Fox said Southeast gives an Academic Profile achievement test to a sampling of about 250 freshmen and a similar number of seniors each year as part of the University Studies program.

The test is designed to assess how well students are learning in terms of general education, in such areas as reading, writing, critical thinking, mathematics, natural sciences, social sciences and humanities, Fox said.

"What we find is our freshmen do not do quite as well as the national sample of freshmen, but our seniors do better than the national sample of seniors," she noted.

Freshmen are tested in the fall, and seniors are tested in the spring, Fox said.

In the fall of 1991, 244 freshmen were given the test. The freshmen scored at the national average for freshmen at comprehensive colleges and universities in the areas of humanities, natural sciences, reading and critical thinking.

They scored below the national average in social sciences, writing and math.

But the scores in all areas were near the national average and the overall score was only a point below the national average.

In addition, most Southeast students take national achievement tests in their major field of study. "Basically, our students are performing above the national average as seniors," said Fox.

She said about 75 percent of seniors or about 800 students per academic year take an achievement test in their major field.

Such tests are increasingly a requirement for students to obtain their degrees, she pointed out.

Fox said it's important to have mandatory testing because few students would volunteer to take such tests. "They don't want to take the time to take it."

Students seeking admission to teacher education programs in Missouri are required to take a test that focuses on English, writing, math, science and social studies.

Fox said the percentages of Southeast students who pass the various parts of the test generally mirror the state average.

For the past four years at Southeast, the pass rate has ranged from 81 percent on the math section to 96 percent in the writing category.

Since 1985, students at Southeast have had to pass a writing exam in order to graduate. "It's becoming increasingly popular for universities to do this," said Fox.

She said such exams are a response to past criticism by employers who complained that college graduates they hired were technically competent in their fields but could not write well.

At Southeast, said Fox, writing is stressed across the curriculum and the institution even has a writing center to help improve students' skills in this area.

"Writing is a skill," she noted. "The more you do it, the better you get at it."

The university has a testing services office that administers the various national achievement tests. "We have an office on testing services. They administer the exams, not the faculty and not the departments," explained Fox.

The exams from national testing services, such as Educational Testing Service in Princeton, N.J., are costly, she said.

That's a major reason why Southeast doesn't administer the Academic Profile test to more freshmen and seniors, said Fox.

She estimated the university spends $7,000 or $8,000 a year for the various educational tests. The cost includes the expense of having the tests scored by national testing services. Southeast's testing service only gives the tests. It does not grade them, explained Fox.

In addition to all these tests, the university does its own follow-up survey of its graduates. Each year, a survey is mailed to those who graduated two years previously.

For example, in May, a survey was sent to all who graduated from Southeast in 1990.

"We ask students about their academic experiences, courses in their major and minor," said Fox.

"We're getting around a 30 to 35 percent response. I think that is really a good response considering we don't have accurate addresses on everybody."

Fox said the university this year hopes to survey employers of Southeast graduates to see how businesses assess the educational skills of those graduates.

She said Missouri colleges and universities are ahead of many in the nation in terms of assessing student learning.

At Southeast, Fox said, there is a real commitment to assessment that goes beyond state requirements. Aided by such assessment, said Fox, a number of departments have revised their curriculums.

At its core, said Fox, such academic testing and assessment comes down to one thing: How can we make education at Southeast better?