Harry Targ
The Lafayette Journal
and Courier published a guest editorial on February 3, 2015 headlined
“Faculty, Stop Stalling on Purdue Testing” co-authored by Andrew Kelly and Frederick
Hess.”
The two authors work for the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Kelly
is the director of the Center on Higher Education Reform established in 2013 by
AEI. The article asserts that the faculty have let a proposed test of “critical
thinking” prepared by the Collegiate Learning Assessment Plus “….languish in
the faculty’s university senate.”
The opinion piece follows on a flurry of articles in
the Lafayette, Indiana newspaper where
Purdue University is located. A lengthy article started on page one about
testing for “critical thinking” at Purdue University on Sunday, January 25,
2015 headlined, “Test of Wills, Who Will Give In?” Two days later, after discussion
of the issue at the scheduled meeting of the University Senate the paper
published another story, also on page one, with the headline “Daniels, Faculty
Civil in Meeting.” Daniels refers to former governor Mitch Daniels who is the
sitting president of the university.
The articles and the solicited opinion piece from
AEI refer to a disagreement some Purdue University faculty were having with a
decision reached by President Mitch Daniels, and the Board of Trustees about
tests to be given incoming and graduating students measuring critical thinking,
reasoning, and the ability to communicate. Presumably these skills could be
defined and measured to determine whether a four-year college experience was
effective.
At the University Senate meeting the President of
the Senate Professor Patty Hart presented a useful summary of what some Purdue
faculty and educators elsewhere viewed as problematic about the project and the
particular test (the Collegiate Learning Assessment Plus) the Board of Trustees
was imposing on the university. She identified areas of concern some faculty
had about the planned measurement of the impacts of four years of study. These
included the lack of clarity about the objectives motivating the exercise, the
validity of measurement tools, who among entering students would be the sample
and why, and what groups the students would be compared with-students from
other universities, young people not attending university, or some other
population, and most importantly, how was critical thinking being defined.
Purdue President Daniels, defending the tests,
pointed out that an often quoted research project found that 36 percent of
students examined demonstrated no change in critical thinking after four years
of college study. Other studies, he said, indicated that high percentages of
employers were dissatisfied with newly hired students’ skills in reasoning and
communication. Despite questions raised by these studies in higher education
publications, Daniels said that he and the Board of Trustees were ready to
proceed to discover what impacts the four-year Purdue college experience had on
young people, or to put it another way, whether college mattered.
The debate at Purdue University and at many other
universities is real, even if not reaching the hyperbolic level of conflict
suggested by the local paper. Faculty have concerns about lack of clarity on
what is being evaluated, testing costs (ultimately paid by taxpayers, tuition,
and faculty and staff salaries), time consumed in taking tests, and profits
accrued to corporations in the education business. Three critical additional issues
stand out.
First, the debate at Purdue University is about
measuring “critical thinking.” There is little discussion of what critical
thinking means. Some would suggest appropriately that critical thinking
involves developing the capacity to reflect upon the knowledge that is being
received. Students should be encouraged to carefully evaluate what they are
being taught, even materials found in lectures and textbooks.
For some educators the ability to decide whether to
accept or to challenge received wisdom, using intellectual rigor and evidence,
is the essence of critical thinking. And challenge requires a rich and
diversified knowledge base. Such a conception of critical thinking might not be
reducible to metrics. Testing responses in writing and especially with multiple
choice tests may be too narrow to address the fundamental intellectual tools
that make up critical thinking.
Second, critical thinking requires historical
knowledge, philosophical insights, an aesthetic sensibility, the ability to
relate knowledge to human behavior, and a sense of the interconnections between
scientific and humanistic world views. The development of a rich tapestry of
knowledge and sensitivity to the natural world, society, and culture is very
difficult to achieve but it should be the goal of higher education. This high
standard may not be easily reducible to measurement of progress.
Finally, and connected to the first and second
criteria, the critical thinking that animates the testing programs being
imposed on students and faculty at Purdue University is based upon a market
model of education. Defenders of the new evaluations refer often to the displeasure
of employers with their new college graduate employees. The references to these
primary “stakeholders,” driving the demand for tests one assumes, are employers
who want the university to produce graduates who can perform particular scientific
and technical cognitive and communication tasks. These tasks are important but
do not necessarily rise to the level of critical thinking.
In sum, the establishment of metrics to measure
critical thinking may not capture the essence of higher education and this is
what has raised concerns of many educators at Purdue University and elsewhere.
But the disagreements should not be reduced, as they were in the local
newspaper to trivialities about the “test of wills” between the faculty and the
President of the university. Nor should the reasoned debates by educators on
campus be trumped by conservative Washington think tank advocates claiming that
the faculty are “dragging their heels.”
As President Daniels wrote to the faculty in his 2015
New Year message “… our land-grant assignment, and frankly that of any
institution claiming to deliver ‘higher education,’ is not limited to the
teaching that produces scientific or technical expertise. Our task calls us to
produce citizens, men and women who are able to think reflectively and creatively
not only at the workplace but also to thrive in those other domains of
well-being measured so interestingly by the Gallup-Purdue Index.”
In the long run, the stakes are about what the
academic community and society see as the goals of higher education. And that
is a discussion that is worth having, allowing for full participation by those
most immediately involved in the educational process: faculty and students.
