Originally posted on August 14, 2018, on LindaSuskie.com
A while back, a faculty member teaching in a community college career program told me, “I don’t need to assess. I know what my students are having problems with—math.”
Well, maybe so, but I’ve found that my perceptions often don’t match reality, and systematic evidence gives me better insight. Let me give you a couple of examples.
Example #1: You may have noticed that my website blog page has an index of sorts on the right side. I created it a few months ago, and what I found really surprised me. I aim for practical advice on the kinds of assessment issues that people commonly face. Beforehand I’d been feeling pretty good about the range and relevance of assessment topics that I’d covered. The index showed that, yes, I’d done lots of posts on how to assess and specifically on rubrics, a pet interest of mine. I was pleasantly surprised by the number of posts I’d done on sharing and using results.
But what shocked me was how little I’d written on assessment culture: only four posts in five years! Compare that with seventeen posts on curriculum design and teaching. Assessment culture is an enormous issue for assessment practitioners. Now knowing the short shrift I’d been giving it, I’ve written several more blog posts related to assessment culture, bring the total to ten (including this post).
Example #2: Earlier this summer I noticed that some of the flowering plants in my backyard weren’t blooming much. I did a shade study: one sunny day when I was home all day, every hour I made notes on which plants were in sun and which were in shade. I’d done this about five years ago but, as with the blog index, the results shocked me; some trees and shrubs had grown a lot bigger in five years and consequently some spots in my yard were now almost entirely in shade. No wonder those flowers didn’t bloom! I’ll be moving around a lot of perennials this fall to get them into sunnier spots.
So, yes, I’m a big fan of using systematic evidence to inform decisions. I’ve seen too often that our perceptions may not match reality.
But let’s go back to that professor whose students were having problems with math and give him the benefit of the doubt—maybe he’s right. My question to him was, “What are you doing about it?” The response was a shoulder shrug. His was one of many institutions with an assessment office but no faculty teaching-learning center. In other words, they’re investing more in assessment than in teaching. He had nowhere to turn for help.
My point here is that assessment is worthwhile only if the results are used to make meaningful improvements to curricula and teaching methods. Furthermore, assessment work is worthwhile only if the impact is in proportion to the time and effort spent on the assessment. I recently worked with an institution that undertook an elaborate assessment of three general education learning outcomes, in which student artifacts were sampled from a variety of courses and scored by a committee of trained reviewers. The results were pretty dismal—on average only about two thirds of students were deemed “proficient” on the competencies’ traits. But the institutional community is apparently unwilling to engage with this evidence, so nothing will be done beyond repeating the assessment in a couple of years. Such an assessment is far from worthwhile; it’s a waste of everyone’s time.
This institution is hardly alone. When I was working on the new 3rd edition of my book Assessing Student Learning: A Common Sense Guide, I searched far and wide for examples of assessments whose results led to broad-based change and found only a handful. Overwhelmingly, the changes I see are what I call minor tweaks, such as rewriting an assignment or adding more homework. These changes can be good—collectively they can add up to a sizable impact. But the assessments leading to these kinds of changes are worthwhile only if they’re very simple, quick assessments in proportion to the minor tweaks they bring about.
So is assessment worth it? It’s a mixed bag. On one hand, the time and effort devoted to some assessments aren’t worth it—the findings don’t have much impact. On the other hand, however, I remain convinced of the value of using systematic evidence to inform decisions affecting student learning. Assessment has enormous potential to move us from providing a good education to providing a truly great education. The keys to achieving this are commitments to (1) making that good-to-great transformation, (2) using systematic evidence to inform decisions large and small, and (3) doing only assessments whose impact is likely to be in proportion to the time, effort, and resources spent on them.