Hidden Transparency � The Quick and the Ed

Hidden Transparency � The Quick and the Ed

Hidden Transparency

by Chad Aldeman

In 2008, the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) sent out a press release boasting that its students made greater learning gains than any school in the country, beating out the likes of Duke, the University of Texas, the University of Michigan, and the University of North Carolina. Its claim rested on the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), a voluntary, nationally administered test that takes the difference between freshmen and senior scores to give the university credit for “value-added.” UNO students scored in the 99th percentile in this measure.
You might think that UNO would want to proudly display these results as much as possible. You would be wrong. The CLA sends each institution a long report documenting the academic accomplishments of their students (see a sample here), but UNO’s report is nowhere to be found.
Unfortunately, this lack of transparency is not particular to UNO or to the CLA. When I was conducting research on the Voluntary System of Accountability last fall, I noticed that a large number of institutions kept their learning outcomes data private. It’s not that they didn’t have the data elements required to be part of the VSA; they simply weren’t prepared to share it. About a quarter of the participating schools had National Survey of Student Engagement data that they could have shared but chose not to. 69 institutions were voluntarily sharing standardized test score results from the CLA or two other options. But another 109 had the data but refused to