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Page count: 55

Shortly after the release of "Measuring Up 2000," an invitational forum of public policy, business, and education leaders was convened by James B. Hunt, Jr., governor of North Carolina, and hosted by Roger Enrico, vice chairman of PepsiCo, at the PepsiCo corporate headquarters in Purchase, New York. The purpose of the forum was to advise the National Center on next steps to address the issue of student learning at the state level. The forum recommended that the National Center begin by using information already available on college outcomes as the building blocks of a model to collect comparative state-by-state information on learning. Forum participants urged the National Center to move ahead with a "demonstration project" to determine whether or not it was feasible to collect information on learning at the state level that would be useful to state policy leaders. The National Center was fortunate to enlist the help of Margaret Miller, professor at the Curry School of Education, to lead the National Forum on College-Level Learning, a five-state demonstration project to develop a model of college-level learning for the states. This report provides a comprehensive account of the project, its findings, and conclusions, as well as information that will be useful to states that may wish to replicate the model. The report concludes that providing comparative state-by-state information about learning outcomes is not only feasible, but also important and useful for policy. The statewide approach, as shown by the demonstration project, allows comparisons among states, providing information about a state's relative standing to the rest of the nation in developing the knowledge and skills of its population. A section titled "How to Implement the Model for College-Level Learning" is appended.