Investigating student learning gains in college: a longitudinal study

General Education Learning Outcomes and Demographic Correlates in University Students in Hong Kong

“…The finding is consistent with previous observations, suggesting that students did not make significant gains in the first year of college (Arum and Roksa 2014;Roohr et al 2016). As argued by some researchers, this may be due to the fact that students need to spend time in Bobserving and learning about the college community^ (Roohr et al 2016, p. 11) before they are able to engage in independent and deeper learning, through which improvement in learning outcomes can be better obtained.…”

“…It was further revealed that for the same sample, students' CLA scores increased significantly after seven semesters' learning (Arum and Roksa 2014), suggesting that students tend to gain more at a later rather than an early stage of their university study. Similar results were presented in other studies (Blaich and Wise 2011;Roohr et al 2016). In Europe, a few large-scale longitudinal SLOs assessment projects have also been carried out since the last decade (Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia et al 2015).…”

“…Findings in SLOs assessment studies were mixed. For example, Roohr et al (2016) examined whether gender predicted university students' learning gains in critical thinking, reading, writing, and mathematics, but they did not find any significant gender effect. However, less effort has been devoted to investigate whether and how gender would affect student achievement in other dimensions.…”

“…Program-level SLOs assessment usually adopts a value-added model to examine students' gains in such aspects as knowledg, skills, and habits of mind as a result of their higher education career (Roohr et al 2016). In this field, most research used a cross-sectional design that measures and compares the learning outcome of two different student cohorts (i.e., freshmen and senior students) (Klein et al 2009;Liu 2011b;Steedle 2012).…”

“…Thus, many researchers advocated for using longitudinal designs which involve comparing SLOs over time for the same student sample (Roohr et al 2016). However, only few studies used longitudinal designs for SLOs assessment in higher education (Roohr et al 2016;Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia et al 2015), mainly due to the expensive cost and time consuming process.…”