When the final report of Secretary of Education Margaret Spelling's Commission on the Future of Higher Education was released in September 2006, the call for higher education to focus on measuring and reporting "meaningful student learning outcomes" was a major charge. The report's suggestion that some standardized tests might be used to collect…

Summative measures of learning collected at the conclusion of an associate or bachelor's degree program are insufficient to help educators and students maximize learning and personal development across the college years. Managing the desired outcomes of college requires an understanding of when learning and growth occur during the educational…