AALHE 2018 Annual Conference

Practitioners in the field of undergraduate education are under pressure to ensure that their students acquire sufficient knowledge and skills for post-college success, but they have limited evidence to demonstrate expected learning gains in specific content areas, generic skills, and noncognitive aspects of student development. This session will discuss a longitudinal study that is currently underway with four partner institutions across the United States. We intend to discuss results from Phase I of this study using secondary cross-sectional data to explore performance differences between different cohorts (e.g., freshmen vs. seniors) based on data from more than 200,000 students attending 300+ U.S. institutions. Three types of outcomes assessments were employed, including assessments of: (1) generic skills (Critical Thinking), (2) domain-specific knowledge in Business, and (3) noncognitive skills in 10 sub-dimensions (e.g., self-management). This session is intended for stakeholders in higher education who are interested in investigating longitudinal trends in student learning outcomes, and will discuss challenges in conducting a longitudinal study in this area. We will also discuss the types of inferences and insights to be gained through longitudinal and cross-sectional data. This session will involve breaking into small groups to facilitate discussion around these topics.