PERSPECTIVES AND PRACTICE
Reflections on Issues, Efforts, and Experiences 

By Teri Lyn Hinds  

At a recent meeting of institutional research and assessment colleagues, I sat mute listening to my peers take deserved solace in our shared struggles around engaging faculty in our work.  Administrators all want to know how to engage faculty, and I just have to laugh. Faculty won't engage in assessment. They just want us to do it for them. While I certainly sympathize with my colleagues, I found myself disagreeing with their grim summation of faculty interest in assessment. In my short time working directly in assessment - officially a mere 18 months - I've discovered that faculty are more often simply overwhelmed by the prospect of adding assessment to their already overflowing plates. In my role as Director of Institutional Planning, Assessment & Research, asking a simple question has resulted in a steady stream of faculty through my door: How can I help you?

At a meeting of faculty in our Professional Education Unit held during our institution's annual Assessment Day last spring, I led a discussion and activity designed to make explicit the relationship between faculty activity in the classroom and institutional accountability and accreditation. Many faculty have a mental image of accreditation as a set of umbrellas that encompass administrative units - the University, a particular college, one specific program. They view their work in the classroom as co-existing with these activities, being covered by these processes as an awning covers a busy sidewalk, but not necessarily directly responsible for holding it up. Instead I proposed that the reality is a pyramid: accreditation and accountability are still at the top, but they rely on a strong and wide foundation of classroom assessment as conducted by faculty. I admit that I was surprised - but maybe shouldn't have been - by how much a revelation this simple inversion was to many in attendance.

Faculty are content experts in their field and their job is to share that knowledge with their students. As such, they are the best able to determine whether students are learning the things they will need to be successful. In many cases, their ability to tell whether a student has learned is innate and even sometimes unconscious; like the oft-quoted Justice Potter Stewart, they "know it when [they] see it". The struggle, therefore, is not necessarily that our faculty aren't engaged in assessment, but rather that they aren't explicitly documenting how they know what they know. Assessment, therefore, needs to be a partnership between faculty and assessment professionals, who can help faculty identify documentation methods that won't add undue burden to their workload. By stating up-front that our faculty are not doing assessment incorrectly - and not accusing them of not doing it at all - we can instead frame the conversation as one of collaboration. By working together, leveraging both their content expertise and expertise from assessment administrators, we can identify the methods and tools most appropriate for their students, classrooms (both face-to-face and virtual) and programs.

The motivation for change is always to improve student learning. If faculty can explain to me how they know when students are learning - and perhaps more importantly when they're not - the conversation quickly turns to how to document, not whether to document. The answers don't have to be intrusive or complicated, and, in fact, they shouldn't be. There is elegance in simplicity, in recognizing that technology should be a means to an end and not the end itself. Nor does engaging in meaningful assessment detract from time spent focusing on student learning. Documenting how our faculty know what they know about how well our students are learning serves both our institutional accreditation and accountability efforts as well as our students' understanding of their own progress. Whether the method is a set of rubrics designed to evaluate student knowledge or performance on important learning outcomes at key points in the curriculum or a simple evaluation of mastery of necessary skills, documentation of student performance makes expectations explicit and provides concrete evidence of areas for improvement - both for individual students and, when aggregated across students and time, for courses and programs.

Teri Lyn Hinds is the Director of Institutional Planning, Assessment & Research at Winona State University. 

READING LIST  
Current Industry Articles and Reports 

The Chronicle of Higher Education ran the article Want Data? Ask Students. Again and Again, which speaks to issues regarding the collection of survey data from college students.   

 

The National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA) released its second Assessment Brief, Making Assessment Meaningful: What New Student Affairs Professionals and Those New to Assessment Need to Know, by Marilee J. Bresciani.  

Unexpected Conversations was an article that recently appeared in Inside Higher Ed that tells of faculty experiences with reshaping a writing curriculum through assessment inquiry at the University of Connecticut.   

The Educational Assessment section of Faculty Focus, a website offering free online articles and newsletters about faculty issues, hosts a variety of topics and issues related to assessment in higher education. Some of the recent articles of interest include To Make Assessment Manageable Keep It Simple and Be Flexible and The Four Questions Every Assessment Report Should Answer.    

 

Haverford College, located near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was founded in 1833 with a focus on learning undergirded by Quaker values. Although the institution is currently non-denominational, its Quaker values of "individual dignity, academic strength, and tolerance" remain at the core of its rigorous curriculum for its student body of nearly 1,200 students.  Recognizing the growing demand of evidence-based assessment, joining the Presidents' Alliance was a natural way for Haverford to continue publicizing its assessment efforts within the higher education community, said Wendy Sternberg, Associate Provost and Professor of Psychology. 

Two intriguing initiatives that Haverford has been working on for current and future academic years are a collaborative project funded by the Teagle Foundation and assessing student learning among alumni. In 2009, Haverford obtained a Systematic Improvement Grant from the Teagle Foundation along with Bryn Mawr College and Swarthmore College. Through this three-year grant project, faculty at the three campuses work collaboratively to develop and implement sustainable assessment initiatives within academic departments that focus on curricular improvement for student learning. Participating departments include disciplines such as psychology, history, and chemistry. This project gives faculty members the opportunity to pursue a "best practice" approach to improve the effectiveness of student learning assessment. Additionally, an approach to improve student learning such as the one among the three campuses helps to establish a critical mass of faculty to address the important issue of learning in higher education. As Sternberg noted, engaging in collaborative work is a collegial way to learn from one another while approaching the issue.

In the future, Haverford will continue assessment initiatives for its alumni. Currently the institution conducts senior exit interviews in which learning outcomes questions are included. Haverford will expand this initiative by putting efforts into the collection and sharing of alumni outcomes data to inform departmental curricular planning. For example, surveys will also capture more extensive data associated with student learning and post-graduate activities and outcomes. Collecting data regarding learning among alumni will be advantageous for understanding the impact of the Haverford experience, since some goals related to student learning are best articulated once students have had time away from the college.

The assessment work that occurs at Haverford demonstrates that engaging in assessment practices can lead to valuable information necessary for evaluating a curriculum and improving student learning. To learn more about this founding member of the Presidents' Alliance and its assessment efforts, visit its institutional profile.    

Help us welcome our new members of the Presidents' Alliance for Excellence in Student Learning and Accountability: Abilene Christian University, Clark University, and Eastern Connecticut State University. Learn more about how each institution is committed to improving student learning by viewing their Action Plans on the the Alliance's website.