The Value-Added Assessment of Higher Education learning: The case of Nagoya University of Commerce and Business in Japan

Abstract

Assessment of higher education learning has been considered
increasingly important. One of the current trends in this field is the
value-added assessmenthow much students learn during a certain
period of time at university. In the United States, for example, Arum
and Roksa (2011) conducted a large-scale assessment on second-year
university students’ learning with the Collegiate Learning Assessment
(CLA) to examine how much university students improved generic
skills during the first two years of higher education. Findings suggested
that they did not improve much. The researchers concluded that the
poor result was attributed to the fact that American university students
on average study only 12 hours a week. In Japan, the situation may be
even worse as Japanese university students on average study 3.5 hours,
much less than their cohorts in the United States. However, studies on
the value-added assessment of Japanese university students’ learning
are scarce. With the Progress Report on Generic Skills (PROG), an
assessment tool similar to CLA, as well as interviews with students who
took PROG, this study quantitatively examines how much students
improved generic skills at a Japanese university during the first two
years of higher education. The findings show that as was the case of the
US peers, Japanese university students in this study did not improve
their generic skills very much in the first two years of higher education.
This study also qualitatively explores possible reasons for such results.
The findings also show that the researched students on average studied
only 40 minutes a week. This study suggests offering more courses with
active learning approaches to intrinsically motivate students in order for
them to spare more time for learning.