A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

Executive Summary

Realizing the Potential: Improving Postsecondary Teaching, Learning, and Assessment

We know that college can profoundly shape students' lives. Yet many students are uncertain as to what they will gain from the collegiate experience. Postsecondary institutions must be clearer about what students will learn, how they will learn, and what levels of learning experience can profoundly impact student learning and success, today its influence is often much less than it could be.

Our message is simple. While there is reason to maintain pride and confidence in the American higher education system, colleges and universities can do a great deal more to improve and enhance their impact on students. The potential to improve postsecondary teaching, learning, and assessment exists. This report illustrates some of the problems, highlights promising programs, and points to practices that can help realize our potential for a more informed, engaged, and self-reflective teaching and learning environment.

In a comprehensive review of the research literature pertaining to higher education's impact on students learning, Ernest Pascarella and Patrick Terenzini wrote that no "single experience will be an important determinant of change of all students. A majority of important changes that occur during college are probably the cumulative result of a set of interrelated experiences sustained over an extended period of time." Through the research programs of NCTLA, we are now gaining insight into what directly and clearly supports the claim that it is the interaction of factors, not single solutions and strategies, that leads to improved undergraduate teaching and learning. Among the findings from these integrated studies are these:

The Institution

• Two-year and four-year institutions provide relatively equal cognitive gains for students after the initial year; students attending two-year institution counterparts.

• For all four-year institutions, faculty who spend more time on research and publishing and less time on teaching earn the highest salaries.

• While many institutions provide equal access to students from underrepresented groups, institutions often fail to provide effective and concrete ways of ensuring support and success within the educational programs.

The students

• African American students attending an historically Black college or university show comparable first-year cognitive gains to their counterparts attending predominantly white institutions.

• The most influential experiences in noncontent learning for students involve human interactions: students, encounters with new and different ideas and people via student-faculty and student-student contacts.

• Active student involvement in their own learning-collaborative learning, internships, meaningful work-study--brings students greater learning effectiveness.

• A positive association exists between high student ratings of teacher organization and preparation and students, reading comprehension, mathematics, and critical thinking achievements.

• Cognitive impediments associated with women's participation in intercollegiate athletics were most pronounced for women athletes who entered college with lowest levels of prior academic achievement.

• Students learn more from a coherent and developmental sequence of courses.

• Faculty, employers, and policy makers agree about the importance of many skills for college graduates. College graduates need critical thinking skills in order to become more effective communicators.

The faculty

• While faculty are innovative and adjust their teaching styles to accommodate students' needs, little reward exists in the system for such investment.

• The average faculty salary ranged from a low of $34,307 for those who spend less than 35 percent of their time on teaching.

• Faculty with the lowest salary have between 6 and 11 classroom hours a week and are the ones who typically teach the bulk of a department's classes.

• Faculty with least amount of student contact hours earned the highest salaries.

• The more refereed publications a faculty member publishes, the higher the salary. Faculty with more than 30 career publications earned an average of $56,183 while those with 2 or less earned $33,198.

• New faculty, particularly women and faculty from ethnic minority groups, do not respond to the traditional faculty socialization process and are often cooled out of the tenure and promotion process.