Ivy Tech CC System Assesses General Education Outcomes With CAAP

CAAP is a standardized outcomes assessment program that postsecondary institutions use to assess, evaluate, and enhance the outcomes of their general education programs. It offers six independent test modules. Institutions can select those modules that best reflect the goals and curricula of their general education programs.

The second largest postsecondary institution in Indiana, Ivy Tech is a statewide open-admissions community college that offers two-year associate degrees and one-year technical certificates and enrolls more than 100,000 students each year. Ivy Tech partners with four-year colleges and universities to provide transfer opportunities. The system also serves the state's businesses and workers with customized training and short-term skill-building programs.

Ivy Tech's College Assessment Committee identified CAAP as its instrument of choice to measure general education outcomes. Ivy Tech uses four CAAP test modules: Writing Skills, Mathematics, Science, and Critical Thinking.

Staff will administer CAAP in the capstone courses in each technical program, said Rebecca Nickoli, executive director of academic support services. Capstone courses—taught in both the fall and spring semesters at Ivy Tech—represent the culminating experiences for students in their program. In some cases, students might be taking a capstone class to develop a portfolio to get ready for the workplace, she said.

Curriculum committees, regional academic deans, and the College Assessment Committee will analyze assessment results and use them to make any needed changes in Ivy Tech's general education curriculum, said Nickoli.

Ivy Tech joins the Arkansas Department of Higher Education, the South Dakota Board of Regents, and states throughout the nation in CAAP system-wide adoptions. In South Dakota, all six public universities administer CAAP, and results of the assessment are used in awarding the South Dakota Opportunity Scholarship. The state awards the scholarship to high school graduates who maintain certain academic standards in college. In Arkansas, all four-year and two-year universities use CAAP to evaluate their general education programs.

David Chadima, ACT postsecondary assessment services consultant, said the CAAP adoptions tie in well with the recently released report of the Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education. "With CAAP, Arkansas, South Dakota, and now Indiana are several years ahead of the rest of the country in terms of accountability—one of the big issues the report addresses," said Chadima.

Specifically, the commission noted, "We believe that improved accountability is vital to ensuring the success of all the other reforms we propose. Colleges and universities must become more transparent about cost, price, and student success outcomes, and must willingly share this information with students and families. Student achievement, which is inextricably connected to institutional success, must be measured by institutions on a value-added basis that takes into account students' academic baseline when assessing their results."

CAAP can help colleges and universities demonstrate student academic progress. CAAP scores, which can be linked to ACT or COMPASS™ scores, provide value-added measures enabling educators to document students' growth in the general education core.