How much do students learn?

"How much do students learn? How do you know?" are the final two sentences of today's NY Times column by David Brooks. Brooks gashes many academic sacred cows in this column: the idea that college makes you a better person and never mind the content, that college advances you from the hormonal confusion of high school to the ethereal thoughts of ivy towers, that students actually learn something in exchange for a decade of student loan payments.

The challenge, he writes, "is not getting educators to embrace the idea of assessment. It's mobilizing them to actually enact it in a way that's real and transparent to outsiders."

I suppose that as an instructor at a technical college I sit smug in my office knowing that in our case, students do learn because our learning product is easy to see and measure: you either learn how to run a CNC machine or you do not; you either learn how to find a vein and drawn blood or you do not; you either learn how to clean the back molars or you do not, you either learn how to produce a profit and loss statement or you do not. Our assessments are rather cut and dry. And, in my case as a basic ed instructor, my students either pass the GED tests or they do not. My instructional colleagues and I are able to point the projects, portfolios, and presentations of our students and say, "Yes, they have learned the material." Our job, we think, is much easier than, say, a French medieval scholar, a business leadership theorist, or even a tenured education professor.

Yet, Brooks challenges this complacency by asking if in addition to teaching students how to create and use widgets, do our students graduate into the workforce with the communicating and thinking skills necessary for employment as well as being contributing members of society. Gulp. He points out that studies show that nearly half the students (albeit he is talking four-year+ degrees here) "show no significant gain in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills during their first two years of college."

Assessment of things and activities are relatively easy. Assessment of critical thinking and communicating skills are much more difficult. The challenge, I think, is first to incorporate these critical skills in all curriculum (which we do on paper) and then work out ways to assess the learning of these skills. That is a continuing challenge for all educators. I don't consider the Brooks column as an indictment of education as much as a challenge, a challenge education needs to accept.