The University of Wisconsin-Stout announced last week it will participate in a study to further the accountability of higher education.

The study is a part of the United States Education Department?s Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education and will help to determine which of three tests universities and colleges nationwide should use to measure student performance.

UW-Stout Office of Budget, Planning and Analysis Director Meredith Wentz said the grant is looking to do more research behind these tests to see if they are accurately gauging academic performance.

The three tests include the ACT Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency test, the Measure of Academic Proficiency and Progress test and the Collegiate Learning Assessment test.

These tests are designed to examine the impact the institution has had on the students? learning by testing for reasoning and communication skills, as well as critical thinking.

?What they want to see is, are the tests that are supposed to be measuring critical thinking ? really measuring [CM1] critical thinking,? Wentz said. ?So what they want to see is that if you are given two tests that are supposed to measure critical thinking, are you scoring similarly on both tests. And that will tell you, ?Yes, these are measuring the same thing.??

She said this study will also help to determine if these tests measure critical thinking differently than they measure other areas of learning, such as writing or math, because they are different.

UW-Stout is one of 15 higher education institutions across the country participating in the study.

The universities will each receive part of the $2.4 million that has been awarded by the EDFIPE grant to further develop work on these tests that assess student learning.

Doug Mell, UW-Stout director of university communications, said this study is part of the Voluntary System of Accountability, a national project aiming to improve the transparency of the progress institutions are making in the education of their students.

He said the idea of the VSA is to find a way to measure the gain in academic performance in students from their freshman to senior years.

?The way it will work is that freshmen and seniors will be given one of three tests, and the idea is to determine which of the three tests does the best job measuring student performance,? Mell said. ?We need a way to assess this and determine which of these tests is most effective and have a better way to tell the public how we are doing.?

All schools in the UW System participate in the VSA and have started within the last few years to administer at least one of these three tests to assess student progress. Most schools in the system use the ACT CAAP test.

Wentz said this study will help UW-Stout and other universities to assess student learning. The study will begin in the fall 2008.