WHAT IS ASSESSMENT?
Barbara Walvoord, a nationally recognized expert on assessment who directs the John Kaneb Center for Teaching and Learning and who is a Professor of English at Notre Dame University, defines assessment as “the systematic gathering and analyzing of information to improve student learning." We agree with Walvoord that “assessment should [a]nswer questions that people really care about," factors like what students already bring with them to UMF, what students are actually keeping from what we’re teaching or what presentation methods seem to be working best.
One way to think about assessing is as an act of taking stock. Assessment begins with “where are we now,” a kind of descriptive reckoning, then targets areas to improve, works on those areas, measures progress, and finally loops back to additional reform if needed. Data collection is part of these steps. It helps to know what questions we’re trying to answer before gathering data, but sometimes the best questions can arise out of a preliminary read on available data.
One of the key problems with discussions about both “assessment” and “data collection” is that they rarely specify what’s being assessed, in particular whether we’re assessing student performance (acquisition of skills, knowledge, or attitudes, measured improve-ment, etc.) or assessing program, course, or specific teaching strategy effectiveness. Of course the two can inform each other.
Another problem revolves around terms used in assessment discussions. Why use all that "jargon"? Jargon has gotten a bad name because it always seems to put off people who aren’t from a given field. In assessment, many of the terms used are educational “jargon” in the sense that they are economical for people in the field because they mean something with a minimum of explanation, but they sometimes seem much less clear to others. We’ve chosen, for this website, to use the assessment jargon of goal, objective, outcome, performance indicator, and rubric in order to be consistent with national con-versations and with conversations in the College of Education at UMF. But—and this is important—we’ve offered our own definitions of the terms, and we’re hoping the site participants will keep questioning the terms. Eventually there might be good arguments for choosing different language.
An Alternate View on Assessment:
James Slevin of Georgetown University criticizes many assessment models for valuing outcomes over intellectual work and for “reducing the intellectual work of faculty and students to the parameters of an instructional program.” He replaces program-oriented assessment catchwords like learning, outcomes, measurement, and team/collaboration with faculty-oriented terms like intellectual work, consequences, self-study, and collegiality. He says that, among other priorities, “efforts to understand and judge the quality of programs should focus on the study and review of how the program creates a spirit of collegiality devoted to critical inquiry.”
In reference to general education, Slevin points out that being unprepared for the expectations of faculty “defines what it means to be a student.” He also provides thoughtful suggestions about approaches to offering “highly focused, intellectually exciting courses that emerge from faculty specializations” for first-year experiences, in particular in writing, and defines real assessment as “critical examination enabling productive work.”
In Jim’s model, education is the work of critical modes of engaged interrogation and students come to the university to become a part of this work. They receive degrees for thoughtful participation in this work, participation we acknowledge institutionally; he suggests that this way of describing assessment might be more appropriate for Arts and Sciences faculty than the idea that we “certify” what students have learned.
This alternative view enables us to consider the language of assessment as something we might work on slowly changing as we become more comfortable.
See the UMF Assessment Group Dialogue Page for the UMF assessment team's earlier discussion on this issue.
If you'd like to comment on this material, please go to the Assessment Discussion Board:
What is the process of creating an assessment plan?
Faculty need to agree on how to talk about assessment. We’ve noticed that many
of UMF’s current program descriptions use words like “goal” or “outcome” to mean
different things. In order to address this issue, we have included a set of
preliminary definitions
to describe what is being assessed and how: goals, objectives/outcomes,
performance indicators, etc. National discussions about assessment use some of these
words in a variety of ways; we have developed these definitions
for our specific needs at UMF.
Go To General Education - Skill Assessment for an explanation of General Education skills requirements.
What do you think? Please e-mail Doug Rawlings with your comments. rawlings@maine.edu or join our discussion board:
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USER NAME: guestuser
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Return To FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions About Assessment
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