Originally posted on March 13, 2018, on LindaSuskie.com
In my February 28 blog post, I noted that many faculty have been expressing frustration that assessment is a waste of an enormous amount of time and resources that could be better spent on teaching. Here are some strategies to help make sure your assessment activities are meaningful and cost-effective, all drawn from the new third edition of Assessing Student Learning: A Common Sense Guide.
Don’t approach assessment as an accreditation requirement. Sure, you’re doing assessment because your accreditor requires it, but cranking out something only to keep an accreditor happy is sure to be viewed as a waste of time. Instead approach assessment as an opportunity to collect information on things you and your colleagues care about and that you want to make better decisions about. Then what you’re doing for the accreditor is summarizing and analyzing what you’ve been doing for yourselves. While a few accreditors have picky requirements that you must comply with whether you like them or not, most want you to use their standards as an opportunity to do something genuinely useful.
Keep it useful. If an assessment hasn’t yielded useful information, stop doing it and do something else. If no one’s interested in assessment results for a particular learning goal, you’ve got a clue that you’ve been assessing the wrong goal.
Make sure it’s used in helpful ways. Design processes to make sure that assessment results inform things like professional development programming, resource allocations for instructional equipment and technologies, and curriculum revisions. Make sure faculty are informed about how assessment results are used so they see its value.
Monitor your investment in assessment. Keep tabs on how much time and money each assessment is consuming…and whether what’s learned is useful enough to make that investment worthwhile. If it isn’t, change your assessment to something more cost-effective.
Be flexible. A mandate to use an assessment tool or strategy that’s inappropriate for a particular learning goal or discipline is sure to be viewed as a waste of everyone’s time. In assessment, one size definitely does not fit all.
Question anything that doesn’t make sense. If no one can give a good explanation for doing something that doesn’t make sense, stop doing it and do something more appropriate.
Start with what you have. Your college has plenty of direct and indirect evidence of student learning already on hand, from grading processes, surveys, and other sources. Squeeze information out of those sources before adding new assessments.
Think twice about blind-scoring and double-scoring student work. The costs in terms of both time and morale can be pretty steep (“I’m a professional! Why can’t they trust me to assess my own students’ work?” ). Start by asking faculty to submit their own rubric ratings of their own students’ work. Only move to blind- and double-scoring if you see a big problem in their scores of a major assessment.
Start at the end and work backwards. If your program has a capstone requirement, students should be demonstrating achievement in many key program learning goals in it. Start assessment there. If students show satisfactory achievement of the learning goals, you’re done! If you’re not satisfied with their achievement of a particular learning goal, you can drill down to other places in the curriculum that address that goal.
Help everyone learn what to do. Nothing galls me more than finding out what I did wasn’t what was wanted and has to be redone. While we all learn from experience and do things better the second time, help everyone learn what to do so, their first assessment is a useful one.
Minimize paperwork and bureaucratic layers. Faculty are already routinely assessing student learning through the grading process. What some resent is not the work of grading but the added workload of compiling, analyzing, and reporting assessment evidence from the grading process. Make this process as simple, intuitive, and useful as possible. Cull from your assessment report template anything that’s “nice to know” versus absolutely essential.
Make assessment technologies an optional tool, not a mandate. Only a tiny number of accreditors require using a particular assessment information management system. For everyone else, assessment information systems should be chosen and implemented to make everyone’s lives easier, not for the convenience of a few people like an assessment committee or a visiting accreditation team. If a system is hard to learn, creates more work, or is expensive, it will create resentment and make things worse rather than better. I recently encountered one system for which faculty had to tally and analyze their results, then enter the tallied results into the system. Um, shouldn’t an assessment system do the work of tallying and analysis for the faculty?
Be sensible about staggering assessments. If students are not achieving a key learning goal well, you’ll want to assess it frequently to see if they’re improving. But if students are achieving another learning goal really well, put it on a back burner, asking for assessment reports on it only every few years, to make sure things aren’t slipping.
Help everyone find time to talk. Lots of faculty have told me that they “get” assessment but simply can’t find time to discuss with their colleagues what and how to assess and how best to use the results. Help them carve out time on their calendars for these important conversations.
Link your assessment coordinator with your faculty teaching/learning center, not an accreditation or institutional effectiveness office. This makes clear that assessment is about understanding and improving student learning, not just a hoop to jump through to address some administrative or accreditation mandate.