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9 Principles of Good Practice for Assessing Student Learning
- The assessment of student learning begins with educational values.
Assessment is not an end in itself but a vehicle for educational
improvement. Its effective practice, then, begins with and enacts a vision of
the kinds of learning we most value for students and strive to help them
achieve. Educational values should drive not only what we choose to
assess but also how we do so. Where questions about educational mission
and values are skipped over, assessment threatens to be an exercise in measuring
what's easy, rather than a process of improving what we really care
about.
- Assessment is most effective when it reflects an understanding of
learning as multidimensional, integrated, and revealed in performance over time.
Learning is a complex process. It entails not only what students know
but what they can do with what they know; it involves not only knowledge and
abilities but values, attitudes, and habits of mind that affect both academic
success and performance beyond the classroom. Assessment should reflect these
understandings by employing a diverse array of methods, including those that
call for actual performance, using them over time so as to reveal change,
growth, and increasing degrees of integration. Such an approach aims for a more
complete and accurate picture of learning, and therefore firmer bases for
improving our students' educational experience.
- Assessment works best when the programs it seeks to improve have
clear, explicitly stated purposes. Assessment is a goal-oriented
process. It entails comparing educational performance with educational purposes
and expectations -- those derived from the institution's mission, from faculty
intentions in program and course design, and from knowledge of students' own
goals. Where program purposes lack specificity or agreement, assessment as a
process pushes a campus toward clarity about where to aim and what standards to
apply; assessment also prompts attention to where and how program goals will be
taught and learned. Clear, shared, implementable goals are the cornerstone for
assessment that is focused and useful.
- Assessment requires attention to outcomes but also and equally to
the experiences that lead to those outcomes. Information about outcomes
is of high importance; where students "end up" matters greatly. But to improve
outcomes, we need to know about student experience along the way -- about the
curricula, teaching, and kind of student effort that lead to particular
outcomes. Assessment can help us understand which students learn best under what
conditions; with such knowledge comes the capacity to improve the whole of their
learning.
- Assessment works best when it is ongoing not episodic.
Assessment is a process whose power is cumulative. Though isolated, "one-shot"
assessment can be better than none, improvement is best fostered when assessment
entails a linked series of activities undertaken over time. This may mean
tracking the process of individual students, or of cohorts of students; it may
mean collecting the same examples of student performance or using the same
instrument semester after semester. The point is to monitor progress toward
intended goals in a spirit of continous improvement. Along the way, the
assessment process itself should be evaluated and refined in light of emerging
insights.
- Assessment fosters wider improvement when representatives from
across the educational community are involved. Student learning is a
campus-wide responsibility, and assessment is a way of enacting that
responsibility. Thus, while assessment efforts may start small, the aim over
time is to involve people from across the educational community. Faculty play an
especially important role, but assessment's questions can't be fully addressed
without participation by student-affairs educators, librarians, administrators,
and students. Assessment may also involve individuals from beyond the campus
(alumni/ae, trustees, employers) whose experience can enrich the sense of
appropriate aims and standards for learning. Thus understood, assessment is not
a task for small groups of experts but a collaborative activity; its aim is
wider, better-informed attention to student learning by all parties with a stake
in its improvement.
- Assessment makes a difference when it begins with issues of use and
illuminates questions that people really care about. Assessment
recognizes the value of information in the process of improvement. But to be
useful, information must be connected to issues or questions that people really
care about. This implies assessment approaches that produce evidence that
relevant parties will find credible, suggestive, and applicable to decisions
that need to be made. It means thinking in advance about how the information
will be used, and by whom. The point of assessment is not to gather data and
return "results"; it is a process that starts with the questions of
decision-makers, that involves them in the gathering and interpreting of data,
and that informs and helps guide continous improvement.
- Assessment is most likely to lead to improvement when it is part of
a larger set of conditions that promote change. Assessment alone
changes little. Its greatest contribution comes on campuses where the quality of
teaching and learning is visibly valued and worked at. On such campuses, the
push to improve educational performance is a visible and primary goal of
leadership; improving the quality of undergraduate education is central to the
institution's planning, budgeting, and personnel decisions. On such campuses,
information about learning outcomes is seen as an integral part of decision
making, and avidly sought.
- Through assessment, educators meet responsibilities to students and
to the public. There is a compelling public stake in education. As
educators, we have a responsibility to the publics that support or depend on us
to provide information about the ways in which our students meet goals and
expectations. But that responsibility goes beyond the reporting of such
information; our deeper obligation -- to ourselves, our students, and society --
is to improve. Those to whom educators are accountable have a corresponding
obligation to support such attempts at improvement.
Authors: Alexander W. Astin; Trudy W. Banta; K. Patricia
Cross; Elaine El-Khawas; Peter T. Ewell; Pat Hutchings; Theodore J. Marchese;
Kay M. McClenney; Marcia Mentkowski; Margaret A. Miller; E. Thomas Moran;
Barbara D. Wright
This document was developed under the auspices of the AAHE Assessment Forum
with support from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education with
additional support for publication and dissemination from the Exxon Education
Foundation. Copies may be made without restriction.
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