Assessment under Resource Constraints

Authors

Steve Lovett, The University of Texas Rio Grande ValleyFollow
Mary Curtis, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

3-2015

Abstract

Assessment and the measurement of learning are receiving increasing emphasis in American higher education. This is a case study that demonstrates a simple, inexpensive method of measuring freshman to senior “gains” or learning using a cross-sectional methodology. Seniors and freshmen within a four-year business program were both given the same multi-part test. Not surprisingly, the seniors’ average score on all parts was higher than that of the freshmen. However, the seniors were older than the freshmen, indicating a possible maturity effect, and had higher average scores on their entrance examinations, indicating a possible selection effect. We used regression techniques to estimate these effects, and subtracted the estimate from the seniors’ gain to estimate a net gain. Our method is applicable to any learning outcome that can be quantified, and we believe that it is both effective and within the means of nearly all U.S. institutions of higher education.

Comments

Authors retain copyright without restrictions. Unless otherwise indicated, from 2021 all articles are published under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license. For more information visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/. Articles published prior to 2021 used a CC-BY-NC-SA license.

Recommended Citation

Lovett, S. and Curtis, M. (2015) “Assessment under Resource Constraints”, Current Issues in Education, 18(1).

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

Publication Title

Current Issues in Education