A Cost-Effectiveness Model for the Assessment of Educational Productivity

✍ Scribed by James S. Catterall

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1998
• Weight: 187 KB
• Volume: 1998
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0271-0560
• DOI: 10.1002/he.10305

✦ Synopsis

This chapter describes and illustrates techniques used to assess productivity in colleges and universities. A brief discussion of issues surrounding productivity in higher education sets the context. The chapter then turns to definitions of cost analysis and the specific techniques of cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analysis. After that, a brief discussion of the application of cost analysis to higher education in general and the problem of educational productivity in particular is offered. Finally, the chapter illustrates the use of these techniques by drawing on a study conducted by the author and colleagues at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in Worcester, Massachusetts, that assessed the costs and benefits of a five-year educational productivity initiative sponsored by the Davis Educational Foundation of Falmouth, Maine. A comprehensive description of this experiment appears as the case study at the end of the chapter.

The WPI Davis project supported individual faculty experimentation with instructional designs in introductory science, mathematics, engineering, and drama courses. During the experiment, eleven WPI faculty members in seven departments modified courses to include cooperative learning involving upperdivision students (peer learning assistants, or PLAs) paid to work as learning facilitators (DiBiasio and Groccia, 1995;Groccia and Miller, 1996;Demetry and Groccia, 1997;Miller and Groccia, 1997). The resulting course design, called peer assisted cooperative learning (PAC), usually brought about reductions in time devoted to faculty lecturing and mediation of student-student problems through the presence of PLAs. PAC courses also involved group projects requiring various forms of cooperative learning.