Originally posted on December 8, 2017, on LindaSuskie.com
Someone on the ASSESS listserv recently asked for recommendations for a good basic book for those getting started with assessment. Here are eight books I recommend for every assessment practitioner's bookshelf (in addition, of course to my own Assessing Student Learning: A Common Sense Guide, whose third edition is coming out on February 4, 2018.)
Assessment Essentials: Planning, Implementing, and Improving Assessment in Higher Education by Trudy Banta and Catherine Palomba (2014): This is a soup-to-nuts primer on student learning assessment in higher education. The authors especially emphasize organizing and implementing assessment.
Learning Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty by Elizabeth Barkley and Claire Major (2016): This successor to the classic Classroom Assessment Techniques (Angelo & Cross, 1993) expands and reconceptualizes CATs into a fresh set of Learning Assessment Techniques (LATs)—simple tools for learning and assessment—that faculty will find invaluable.
How to Create and Use Rubrics for Formative Assessment and Grading by Susan Brookhart (2013): This book completely changed my thinking about rubrics. Susan Brookhart has a fairly narrow vision of how rubrics should be developed and used, but she offers persuasive arguments for doing things her way. I’m convinced that her approach will lead to sounder, more useful rubrics.
Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses by L. Dee Fink (2013): Dee Fink is an advocate of backwards curriculum design: identifying course learning goals, identifying how students will demonstrate achievement of those goals by the end of the course, then designing learning activities that prepare students to demonstrate achievement successfully. His book presents an important context for assessment: its role in the teaching process.
Using Evidence of Student Learning to Improve Higher Education by George Kuh, Stan Ikenberry, Natasha Jankowski, Timothy Cain, Peter Ewell, Pat Hutchings, and Jillian Kinzie (2015): The major theme of this book is that, if assessment is going to work, it has to be for you, your colleagues, and your students, not your accreditor. This book is a powerful argument for moving from a compliance approach to one that makes assessment meaningful and consequential. If you feel your college is simply going through assessment motions, this book will give you plenty of practical ideas to make it more useful.
Five Dimensions of Quality: A Common Sense Guide to Accreditation and Accountability by Linda Suskie (2014): I wrote this book after working for one of the U.S. regional accreditors for seven years and consulting for colleges in all the other U.S. accreditation regions. In that work, I found myself repeatedly espousing the same basic principles, including principles for obtaining and using meaningful, useful assessment evidence. Those principles are the foundation of this book.
Assessment Clear and Simple: A Practical Guide for Institutions, Departments, and General Education by Barbara Walvoord (2010): The strength of this book is its size: this slim volume is a great introduction for anyone feeling overwhelmed by all he or she needs to learn about assessment.
Effective Grading by Barbara Walvoord and Virginia Anderson (2010): This is my second favorite assessment book after my own! With its simple language and its focus on the grading process, it’s a great way to help faculty develop or improve assessments in their courses. It introduces them to many important assessment ideas that apply to program and general education assessments as well.