If you look up “assessment” in the dictionary, you will not find reference to team sports. What you will find are definitions that include concepts such as evaluation, judgment, appraisal, valuation, measurement, or estimation. Certainly, these are important elements of assessment, but they have the potential to constrict assessment to a product. Assessment is not a product, it is a process. Nor is assessment a solo endeavor. It is a team effort.
According to Linda Suskie (Assessment & Accreditation Consultant) and Jane Wolfson (Towson University), program assessment is the process of deciding what we want students to learn and making certain they learn it (Suskie, 2016). Note the emphasis on the plural pronouns.
Related Reading: The Ins and Outs of Higher Education’s Culture of Assessment
The We & They of Assessment
Let’s examine the “we” first. In a culture of assessment, this pronoun can refer to varied groups of people. We is often the program faculty who map curriculum and determine the most critical outcomes students must master. It can also refer to professional organizations who have established national standards within their disciplines. In both cases, it is a group who collaboratively identified and vetted standard benchmarks within a field of study.
The second pronoun, “they”, obviously refers to students. The important distinction is the reference to multiple students as opposed to a single student. This implies assessment is not synonymous with grades given to individual students.
While grades indicate the extent to which one student met a learning outcome, assessment provides indication of the aggregate performance of students in relationship to a learning outcome. They could be a collective of students within a single course, across multiple sections of a course, or from different courses which address the same outcome. Regardless of the makeup of the group, assessment results of a set of students inform the teaching and learning within a program.
Assessment Is: What WE DO
The processes of identifying outcomes, assessing performance, and making program decisions complete the assessment cycle. You can find different variations of the assessment cycle, but I use the graphic below because it accomplishes so much with a simple image and few words. The graphic defines program assessment as a collaborative and collective process, depicts the assessment cycle, and represents a culture of assessment.
First, notice that what is taught is not reflected by a single faculty member or by an outside administrative entity. What is taught is determined by a collective and collaborative we. This may reflect the shared expertise of program faculty or, in some instances, professionals within a discipline.
In both cases, a team of subject specific authorities come to a consensus regarding student learning outcomes. They identify what students should know and be able to do at the completion of a program. This means responsibility for student learning is not isolated at the individual course level. There is a collective program responsibility.
Second, assessment results are labelled by an additional WE – Weighed Evidence. This implies not all evidence is equal, and some results may hold greater value for a program. While grading results of individual students is important, the graphic conveys the assessment results which are most influential to program decisions are the collective evidence of a group of students.
Third, Data Ownership infers assessment results have an owner who will DO something with the data. The owner is not a single person such as a chair or central administrator. The owner is the entire program team. In order to have continuous program improvement, faculty must have access to assessment results and review them as a faculty group rather than as individual course instructors. Doing so will expose potential curriculum gaps across the program. Only then will assessment influence decisions and actions which impact teaching and learning throughout the entire program.
Finally, the graphic captures what is meant by a culture of assessment. When a culture of assessment exists, assessment becomes the natural order of business and faculty view assessment as inherent to their work. To faculty, assessment simply becomes, “What WE DO.”
What does this all mean? Assessment is a team sport and as such, should not be relegated to administrators. Involvement of the entire faculty is critical to all components of the assessment cycle, and program assessment is dependent on the collective expertise and collaborative efforts of faculty.
Administrators do have an important role in building and sustaining a culture of assessment. Administrators lead the faculty team by defining roles and providing routines, resources, and recognition related to assessment efforts. These topics will be the focus of future blog posts.
References:
Suskie, L. (2016). Taking a fresh look at assessment. [Webinar PowerPoint slides, March 14, 2016, University of Nebraska Omaha].
Author
Dr. Connie Schaffer is an Assistant Professor in the Teacher Education Department at the University of Nebraska Omaha (UNO). She serves as the College of Education Assessment Coordinator and is involved in campus-wide assessment efforts at UNO. Her research interests include urban education and field experiences of pre-service teachers. She co-authored Questioning Assumptions and Challenging Perceptions: Becoming an Effective Teacher in Urban Environments (with Meg White and Corine Meredith Brown, 2016).
