CHAPTER 1
What Is Assessment?

Some valuable ideas you'll find in this chapter

• Assessment is simply deciding what we want students to learn and making sure they learn it.
• Assessment is a cousin of traditional empirical research.
• Assessment today is based on research on effective teaching strategies in higher education.

While the term assessment can be used broadly - we can assess the achievement of any goal or outcome - in this book, the term generally refers to the assessment of student learning. Many assessment practitioners have put forth definitions of student learning assessment, but the best one I've heard is in the Jargon Alert box. It's from Dr. Jane Wolfson, a professor of biological sciences at Towson University (personal communication, n.d.). It suggests that student learning assessment has three fundamental traits.

Jargon Alert!

Assessment

Assessment is deciding what we want our students to learn and making sure they learn it.

1. We have evidence of how well our students are achieving our key learning goals.
2. The quality of that evidence is good enough that we can use it to inform important decisions, especially regarding helping students learn.
3. We use that evidence not only to assess the achievement of individual students but also to reflect on what we are doing and, if warranted, change what we're doing.

Assessment is part of teaching and learning

Assessment is part of a four-step process of helping students learn (List 1.1). These four steps do not represent a one-and-done process but a continuous four-step cycle (Figure 1.1). In the fourth step, evidence of student learning is used to review and possibly revise approaches to the other three steps (see Jargon Alert on closing the loop), and the cycle begins anew.

Figure 1.1: Teaching, Learning, and Assessment as a Continuous Four-Step Cycle

List 1.1 The Four-Step Teaching-Learning-Assessment Process

1. Establish clear, observable expected goals for student learning
2. Ensure that students have sufficient opportunities to achieve those goals
3. Systematically gather, analyze, and interpret evidence of how well student learning meets those goals
4. Use the resulting information to understand and improve student learning

If the cycle in Figure 1.1 looks familiar to you, it's the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle of business quality improvement popularized by Deming (2000): Plan a process, do or carry out the process, check how well the process is working, and act on the information obtained during the Check step to decide on improvements to the process, as appropriate.

Jargon Alert!

Closing the Loop

Closing the loop is the fourth step of the teaching-learning-assessment cycle. In the fourth step, evidence of student learning is used to understand and improve student learning by improving the other steps in the cycle: Establishing learning goals, ensuring sufficient learning opportunities, and assessing learning.

Comparing traditional and current approaches to assessment

Faculty have been assessing student learning for centuries, often through written and oral examinations. How do today's approaches to assessment differ from traditional approaches? Table 1.1 summarizes some key differences between traditional and contemporary ways of thinking about assessment.

Table 1.1: Traditional Versus Contemporary Ways of Thinking About Assessment

Traditional Approaches: Assessment is. . . Contemporary Approaches: Assessment is. . . Planned and implemented without consideration of learning goals, if any even exist Carefully aligned with learning goals: The most important things we want students to learn (Chapter 4) Often focused on memorized knowledge Focused on thinking and performance skills (Chapter 4) Often poor quality, simply because faculty and staff have had few formal opportunities to learn how to design and use effective assessment strategies and tools Developed from research and best practices on teaching and assessment methodologies (Chapters 3 and 26) Used only to assess and grade individual students, with decisions about changes to curricula and pedagogies often based on hunches and anecdotes rather than solid evidence Used to improve teaching, learning, and student success as well as to assign grades and otherwise assess individual students (Chapters 6 and 26) Used only in individual course sections; not connected to anything else Viewed as part of an integrated, collaborative learning experience (Chapter 2) Not used to tell the story of our successes; stories are told through anecdotes about star students rather than broader evidence from representative students Used to tell our story: What makes our college or program distinctive and how successful we are in meeting societal and student needs (Chapter 25)

Comparing assessment and grading

Obviously there is a great deal of overlap between the tasks of grading and assessment, as both aim to identify what students have learned. There are two key differences, however. The first is that the grading process is usually isolated, involving only an individual faculty member and an individual student. Assessment, in contrast, focuses on entire cohorts of students, and it often considers how effectively many people, not just an individual faculty member, are collectively helping them learn.

The second difference between grading and assessment is that they have different purposes. The main purpose of grades is to give feedback to individual students, while assessment has three broader purposes discussed in Chapter 6: Ensuring and improving educational quality, stewardship, and accountability. Grades alone are usually insufficient to achieve these purposes for several reasons.

Grades alone do not usually provide meaningful information on exactly what students have and haven't learned.    We can conclude from a grade of B in an organic chemistry course, for example, that the student has probably learned a good deal about organic chemistry. But that grade alone cannot tell us exactly what aspects of organic chemistry she has and has not mastered.

Grading and assessment criteria may differ.    Some faculty base grades not only on evidence of what students have learned, such as tests, papers, presentations, and projects, but also on student behaviors that may or may not be related to course learning goals. Some faculty, for example, count class attendance toward a final course grade, even though students with poor attendance might nonetheless master course learning goals. Others count class participation toward the final grade, even though oral communication skills aren't a course learning goal. Some faculty downgrade assignments that are turned in late. Under these grading practices, students who do not achieve major learning goals might nonetheless earn a fairly high grade by playing by the rules and fulfilling other less-important grading criteria. Conversely, students who achieve a course's major learning goals might nonetheless earn a poor grade if they fail to do the other things expected of them. To better sync grading and assessment criteria, add a professionalism learning goal (Chapter 4) or develop a competency-based curriculum (Chapter 5).

Grading standards may be vague or inconsistent.    While many faculty base assignment and course grades on carefully conceived learning goals and standards, others may base grades on inconsistent, imprecise, and idiosyncratic criteria. Faculty may say they want students to learn how to think critically, for example, but base grades largely on tests emphasizing factual recall. Faculty teaching sections of the same course may not agree on common standards and may therefore award different grades to similar student performance. Sometimes individual grading standards are so vague that a faculty member might, in theory, award an A to a student's work one day and a B to identical work a week later.

Grades do not reflect all learning experiences.    Grades give us information on student performance in individual courses or course assignments (Association of American Colleges & Universities, 2002), but they do not provide information on how well students have learned key competencies, such as critical thinking or writing skills, over an entire program. Grades also do not tell us what students have learned from ungraded co-curricular experiences.

Do grades have a place in an assessment effort?    Of course they do! Grades can be useful, albeit indirect (Chapter 3), and...