Assessing College Educational Quality: An Inside View of Teaching Quality and Rigor in U.S. College and University Classrooms

Corbin Campbell

Do rankings represent colleges with strong educational practices? While many critiques of higher education focus on a lack of learning in college (e.g. Arum & Roksa, 2011), these studies do not view higher education from the inside: by watching the educational processes unfold. In this study, I use a new conceptualization and proximal methods to witness the educational quality of classrooms across diverse institutions of higher education. Building upon the previous work of k-12 and higher education scholars of teaching and learning, the study uses a developing framework that focuses on college coursework and the practices that take shape between faculty, students, course content, and context.By contrast with K-12 education research, which has an extensive, broad-scale, quantitative observational program of study (e.g., Hill, Charalambous, & Kraft, 2012), to date there is no similar study of college teaching. In this study, I examine a representative sample of 587 courses across nine colleges and universities by witnessing in-class educational processes (observation) and analyzing curricula (syllabi). Data were collected during spring 2013-fall 2014. The colleges and universities represented in the study range from highly selective and highly ranked to broad access and unranked. My work begins to address substantive questions about educational processes across diverse institutions, for example: Do courses in high prestige institutions have better teaching than courses in low prestige institutions? Although early in understanding, this study begins to question whether the reward structures in higher education have bifurcated prestige and the teaching and learning process.

About Corbin Campbell

Dr. Corbin M. Campbell is an Assistant Professor of Higher Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her work, broadly situated, examines the organizational contexts that support learning and growth for students and faculty in higher education. Her recent inquiry has focused on developing new ways to conceptualize and measure the educational quality of colleges and universities that more closely reflect the teaching and learning process. By understanding college quality from a teaching and learning perspective, her work begins to question the current institutional prestige and reward structures in higher education. Dr. Campbell grounds this research in her earlier work on understanding faculty careers. Her research has been published in such venues as the Journal of Higher Education, Research in Higher Education, the Review of Higher Education, and the Journal of College Student Development, and has been highlighted in the Chronicle of Higher Education and the New York Times. She serves on the editorial boards of Review of Higher Education, Research in Higher Education and the Journal of College Student Development. She also serves on the Committee on Assessing Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Competencies for the National Academies. Dr. Campbell received her PhD. in educational policy from the University of Maryland.