Winston-Salem State University College Portrait

All colleges and universities use multiple approaches to measure student learning. Many of these are specific to particular disciplines, many are coordinated with accrediting agencies, and many are based on outcomes after students have graduated.

The Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) is a national assessment effort by the Council for Aid to Education that aims to provide colleges and universities with information about how well their students are doing with respect to certain learning outcomes shared by many undergraduate institutions, i.e., critical thinking, analytic reasoning, problem solving, and written communication. This information is derived from tests that are administered to all or a sample of a participating institution’s freshmen and seniors.

The CLA focuses on how well the school as a whole contributes to student development. It uses the institution (rather than the individual student) as the primary unit of analysis. It does this by measuring the “value added” an institution provides where value added is defined in two ways, namely:

• “Deviation Scores” indicate the degree to which a school’s students earn higher or lower scores than would be expected where the expectation is based on (1) the students’ admissions test scores (i.e., SAT scores or ACT scores converted to SAT equivalents) and (2) the typical relationship between admission scores and CLA scores across all of the participating institutions. In other words, how well do the students at a school do on the CLA tests relative to the scores earned by “similar students” (in terms of entrance examination scores) at other colleges and universities?
• “Difference Scores” contrast the performance of freshmen with seniors. Specifically, after holding admission scores constant, do an institution’s seniors earn significantly higher scores than do its freshmen and most importantly, is this difference larger or smaller than that observed at other colleges?

Over 400 institutions and 165,000 students have participated in the CLA. Participating institutions span Carnegie Classifications descriptions. Although the institutional sample is large, its composition is not representative of the national higher education institutional population. Also, student sampling procedures vary widely from one participating institution to another.

WSSU’s participation in CLA testing comprised two types of test administrations: a longitudinal study and a cross-sectional testing program. The longitudinal study began in fall 2005 with 183 new freshmen (some methodically selected, some self-selected) that formed the cohort for the longitudinal study. This group was re-tested as rising juniors, then again as seniors. The study concluded with the spring 2009 testing of the seniors in this cohort. The report on the longitudinal study gave feedback at the institutional level of how the students performed on the test compared with other participants with similar backgrounds (admissions test scores) – the deviation scores, as well as the performance difference of the students testing as freshmen and then again as seniors – the difference scores, which also aims to measure institutional contribution to performance.

WSSU also participates in the cross-sectional testing program, in which freshmen are tested in the Fall and seniors are tested in the Spring. The freshmen are selected by course, the seniors self-select. Thus, even though a freshman cohort may be tested again in four years, the individuals forming the original freshmen sample may not necessarily constitute the senior sample. Cross-sectional testing began with seniors in Spring 2009 and continued with freshmen in Fall 2009.

Colleges and universities participating in the College Portrait measure the typical improvement in students' abilities to think, reason, and write using one of three tests. This is part of a pilot project to better understand and compare what students learn between their freshman and senior years at different colleges and universities.

Results from the Collegiate Learning Assessment

The Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) measures critical thinking, analytic reasoning, problem solving, and written communication using a performance task and an analytic writing task. The scores from the tasks are reported separately below.

Performance Task Results for First-time, Full-time Students

The increase in learning on the performance task is what would be expected at an institution with students of similar academic abilities.

Freshman Score: 1005
Senior Score: 1055
CLA score range: 400 to no maximum score.

Average SAT scores for tested students
Freshman Score: 951
Senior Score: 0

Analytic Writing Task Results for First-time, Full-time Students

The increase in learning on the analytic writing task is what would be expected at an institution with students of similar academic abilities.

Freshman Score: 1000
Senior Score: 1041
CLA score range: 400 to no maximum score.

Average SAT scores for tested students
Freshman Score: 951
Senior Score: 0