Assessing Student Collegiate Experience: Where do we begin?

The idea of assessing how much students learn, improve, or grow in college, as well as how they stand at graduation, has been gaining momentum over the 'reputational' and 'resources' approaches. This study is to demonstrate how this new approach can work even if an institution has already committed to using an externally-developed survey instrument to assess student collegiate experience. It attempts to articulate student collegiate experience using self-reports and to construct the gain scales that can be used as the outcome measures in an institution's assessment efforts.