Stanford’s Shavelson & Boulder’s Domingue on VAMs in Higher Ed
A few months ago, well over 10,000 educational researchers/academics from throughout the world attended the Annual Conference of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, during which many of the said researchers/academics also presented their newest educational research and findings.
One presentation I did not get to attend, but from which I fortunately received thePowerPoint Slides, was a presentation titled “Measuring College Value-Added: A Delicate Instrument” presented by Stanford University’s Richard Shavelson and University of Colorado – Boulder’s Benjamin Domingue.
As summarized from their presentation, the motivation for measuring value added in higher education, while similar to what is happening in America’s K-12 public schools (i.e., to theoretically measure college program quality and the “value” various higher education programs “add” to student learning), is also very different. Whereas in K-12 schools, for what they are worth, there are standardized tests that can be used to at least attempt to measure value-added. Most testing in higher education is course based, in many ways fortunately—in that it is closely linked to content covered by the professor, and in other ways not—in that it is typically unreliable and narrow. Hence, while tests used in higher education (for the most part) are often idiosyncratic and non-standardized, they are often more instructionally sensitive and relevant than the large-scale standardized tests found Stanford’s Shavelson & Boulder’s Domingue on VAMs in Higher Ed |: