https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/11/09/study-questions-whether-elite-college-courses-are-higher-quality-others?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=6bb53edc04-DNU20151109&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-6bb53edc04-197625149
So how do the researchers go about trying to define and measure the quality of education, arguably a holy grail? By sending actual faculty observers into nearly 600 classrooms at nine colleges and universities with various levels of prestige and having them judge the teaching quality and academic rigor of the courses they offer, using a common rubric on which the observers have been trained for about 30 hours. The nine institutions -- three with high prestige, two medium prestige and four with low prestige -- were a mix of public and private, teaching and research intensive....
The researchers acknowledge many limitations in their approach (about which more later), and characterize the study as only a “first step toward examining the relationship between prestige and in-class practices.”
But they found that on only one of the five measures, cognitive complexity of the course work, did the elite colleges in the study outperform the nonelite institutions.
On two, standards and expectations of the course work and the level of the instructors’ subject matter knowledge, there were no meaningful differences by prestige level. On two others, though -- the extent to which the instructors “surfaced” students’ prior knowledge and supported changes in their views, the lower-prestige institutions outperformed the elite ones. (Drilling down, there were differences between the prestige levels for the public institutions in the study, but not between prestigious and nonprestigious private nonprofit ones.)....
The guiding assumption is that observed measures of -- for example -- cognitive complexity of readings or lectures somehow spurs greater levels of student complex thinking and behavior. In the absence of evidence of actual student performance … we are left to assume that the measures of teaching quality used in this study really do represent educational quality (i.e., better student performance/more learning, greater proficiency in applying learning and so forth). Probably in some instances, but likely not in others.”
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