Are our courses working? Measuring student learning

This article describes an assessment carried our in collaboration with the administrators of a large freshman English course. The assessment team work ed with instructors to identify course goals and to design tasks that the i nstructors felt would fairly assess the extent to which the students achiev ed the goals. Students who did and did not take the course were both pre- a nd posttested on five central goals: critical reading, argument identificat ion, differentiation of summary and paraphrase, understanding of key terms used in the course, and practical strategies for writing academic papers. R esults of the assessment failed to indicate any substantial improvement on any of the five course goals for students who took the course. These result s contrasted with positive outcomes obtained by the same assessment team wi th introductory history and statistics courses. The article concludes with reflections on why instructors may fail to recognize that their courses are not working.