Quest for International Measures of Higher-Education Learning Results Raises Concerns

A fledgling international effort to develop comparable assessment standards for measuring how much students are learning at higher-education institutions throughout the world is provoking concern from several quarters, even though the project is still in its preliminary stages.
The push is being led by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, whose 30 member countries include many of the world's most advanced economies, such as Australia, Japan, the United States, and several European nations. The effort grew out of a meeting last year of the group's education ministers and secretaries, at which the apparent dearth of available data on student-learning outcomes prompted discussion about how to fill that void. [View Full Article - By Subscription - The Chronicle]