I somewhat agree that some assessment programs emanate from one of Dante’ rings, and I would venture to guess that they have been driven by those who talk the talk, but really have little clue about what it means. After all, assessments have to be in binders, never mond in electronic form. Assessments must be written up in a single page of bullet-point phrases. Assessment results must be used to create change, but yet, noone seems to get it that time is needed, adjustments must be carefully instituted, and there can be no interference from folk who run the place, but not the whole place.Some assessment gurus actualy do have a clue, and have to be given the chance to do the job they were hired to do, unfortunately, there are a lot of those who chat the chat, but do not practice the dance.

The “learning outcomes” shouldn’t be coming from the administration at all.

crankycat: you’re right. The learning outcomes shouldn’t be coming from “the administration” (whatever that is). And in my experience, they are not! The DEMAND for “learning outcomes assessment” is coming from the regional accreditors. The faculty are devising the learning outcomes. When administrators get involved, they are simply making sure that the institution is doing what it has to to keep the accreditors happy, so that the institution does not lose its accreditation, and therefore ability to receive any federal funds, including all federal financial aid. Such a result is not a joke, and is a very real possibility. While I am personally no fan of accreditor-imposed things like this, I do feel that it is an easily perpetuated and patently false myth that evil administrators are thinking this stuff up, and cramming it down the faculty’s throat. It’s not true.

Good ol’ 11167997 has it about right. It’s not rocket science. Can we show with a few solid examples that our students are learning what we think we are teaching?

Are we after student learning outcomes or student skill attainment outcomes? Skill levels can be assessed. Learning??? I’m not so sure.

In response to our administration’s demand that course-specific SLOs be put in the syllabus (and not just a copy of the department’s SLOs), I devised an in-class exercise for the first day. Students view the department SLOs, the syllabus (which has my narrative of objectives for the course), and any special focus requirements (writing intensive for example). Then they work in groups to develop SLOs for our class, which I then collate into a single set and post. This process has the added benefit of getting them to read and actively engage with the syllabus. At the end of the semester, the student evaluation form asks them to evaluate the course on each of the SLOs they devised.

Does nobody ever see the elephant in the room of assessment-of-major outcomes? The emphasis seems to always be on what faculty are or are not doing to meet learning goals. One can explicate and enumerate as many learning goals as one likes. But, at the University level, it’s up to the students to make certain that actual learning takes place. This is not high school. We’re not in the business of teaching “for the assessment goal.” Students who “get it” have no problem. Too many just don’t get it. Maybe sometimes that’s the fault of faculty who fail to get them engaged, but not always. It’s easy to blame allegedly overpaid faculty (who work 60-80 hr/week and get paid for 35-40 hr) for the shortcomings of students who are used to being spoon-fed material (from high school) and, in many cases, do not want to evolve beyond that. Fortunately, there are a lot of exceptions to that. But this assessmentpalooza is wearing thin, as it considers only the faculty-side of the coin.

We send our students off to transfer institutions, to graduate schools, to prospective employers, with our “certification” that they are now “college educated” because of the rigors through which we have put them. Suppose along the way they started to tell us “You don’t need to test us! We know what you are teaching us. You don’t need any proof of this.” We’d balk at it. Of course we need “evidence” from them that they have learned (and what they have learned) before we allow them to say they have “completed a degree” at our institutions. So what then is the mystery if someone outside of our professional circles (or from within) asks *us* “what have your students learned, and how do you know this?” Even more so, shouldn’t it be a dimension of good teaching itself to cultivate this self-reflective query as an ongoing habit– to ask ourselves, and to encourage our students to ask of themselves as well, “what are we learning, and how do we know?” We need to stop ceding this fundamental query of learning to those who might reduce it to a mere matter of “counting” and “accountability.”

Outcome (from Onelook):▸ Noun: “a phenomenon that follows and is caused by some previous phenomenon”▸ Noun: “something that results.”So much for “outcomes.” And if that isn’t ambiguous enough, consider:Aristotle thought the tides (outcomes) were due to/correlated with the motion of the earth (previous phenomenon). On the other hand, Newton thought they were due to the moon. Newton thought gravity existed. Einstein dispensed with that and said matter tells space how to curve and space tells matter how to move.In other words, the inherent philosophical problematic of “motion-at-a-distance” is inherently at the heart of “assessment.” To construct an industry known as “assessment” can be done by anyone, and be completely meaninglesss at the same time. The assessment industry is philosophically dishonest in making it claims while it biggybacks on those of us in the trenches who do the work. Enough of these service industries, these “beltway bandits.”

I find it really difficult to understand why so many educated folks are struggling with such a basic and fundamental concept. For those faculty who also do research, would you get published if your results and discussion were “I administered the test, assigned an A and so just trust me the experiment was a success.” Why do some see it as an imposition to actually project the outcomes we expect and then measure them in language that is understandible and reproducible? Yes, some calls are coming from accreditors and some from administration, but also those who hire our graduates or accept them for advanced education would like some idea of just what that A in English Composition or Biology 101 actually means. In other what skills, knowledge and attitudes have been mastered…or not.

I find myself in agreement with millerdb upthread – in that the onus for learning in college is on the student. College faculty are not called teachers – they are called professors, and I believe there is a difference. For example – I have enough chutzpah, and musical knowledge, to teach a beginning piano course – but I could not be a professor of piano, mainly because I don’t know how to play one beyond a rudimentary level. To profess something is to have a profound passion and a certain depth of knowledge about it. To teach something, IMHO, is simply to be able to follow a lesson plan and be able to stay one chapter ahead of the students. I also agree with the observation that administrators tend to focus on the need for faculty to change the means through which they deliver “learning” – while tacitly assuming that the students are passive and receptive vessels for such learning. One rarely, if ever, hears an open discussion about enrolling a “better student” – or the recommendation that students need to take a more active role in their own learning. And therein lies the fallacy of assessment. It is also true that accreditation agencies are generally the driving force behind “outcomes assessment.” I think this may be best explained through Max Weber’s classic work on the nature of bureaucracies. To wit: once a bureaucracy is brought into existence its primary function becomes self-perpetuation. To do this, it must find, and occasionally modify its raison-d’etre. Accreditation agencies have done this through the creation of “outcomes assessment.” Middle-States – the agency that accredits my institution – runs countless conferences and workshops on assessment every year, for which it collects substantial registration and workshop fees. The goal seems to be to turn professors into classroom automatons – who will somehow dispense measurable units of knowledge that will enter students brains and be regurgitated somehow in measurable units of learning. Somehow the whole noble idea of a liberal education seems lost in all this garbage.

I understand the need for assessment outcomes. Albeit it is worthless. What I do not understand is how anyone can hold me accountable for what the student learned or did not learn. I did not give birth to any of these students and I am, therefore, not responsible for their ability or inability to learn anything. That is a genetic and a motivational issue.

Assessment in the university setting is like creating a garden out of wild flowers. The flowers are already out there all around us. It is a matter of trimming back a few weeds, giving special care to the prettiest flowers, and labeling everything for those who are interested. The assessment is being done because part of being a good teaching is knowing what you want to teach, keeping in your teacher’s toolbox what works, and tossing out what doesn’t. Assessment is a faculty enterprise and cannot be done by administration. Administration must, acting as a gardener, build the paths, put on the nameplates, and occasionally act as a docent for the accrediting agencies who are coming through on tour.

The pendulum begins to swing back, my friends. Let’s look at the larger picture. Before the 1990′s, when funding and resources were more abundant, but first under assault by tax starved states and the Feds,it was relatively simple to introduce the concept of learning assessment as the worldview requiring that institutions provide empirical evidence that students are indeed achieving the learning objectives of individual courses or entire programs. Who could argue against the production of evidence as part of the cycle of ascertaining the integrity of the product? And, as with every new movement, along came the avatars, proponents and apostles to promote this new way of seeing the academic enterprise (and think of all the lovely newly forged career with all those lovely, informative conferences and retreats!), validated finally by every regional, national and professional accrediting body and incorporated like the Decalogue into accreditation standards requirements….real motherhood and apple pie!But now we find our institutions, especially the publics, starved of resources, hardly able to support student learning and with larger class sizes and fewer full-time tenured professors, a growing proposrtion of instruction now assign to academic piece rate workers…and all of these people are subject to the demands of accreditors and their willing college co-administrators to impose these demands on them and their time, with fewer resources available, creating a vicious cycle of non-learning for our students, and dovetailing quite nicely with the prevailing cultural antipathy toward the substance of higher education generally and the embracing of the superficiality of the symbol of higher education (i.e., the diploma) as what one buys as a consumer to verify one’s entitlement to a job upon graduation.The beauty of this unhealthy symbiosis is impressive. The authorities want more learning assessment but cannot or will not provide the resources to do it, let alone enable supporting the professoriate to do its job better, and always with less.The time will come when the assessment movement, despite its ideals, will crumble because there will simply no longer be resources to support assessment that means anything beyond test-taking, like the whole BS No Child Left Behind travesty. Learning assessment is undoing higher education, justifying administrators in the non-allocation of resources to faculty and staff. This Potemkin Village of “quality-assurance” in education will collapse in time. And I say this as one of the former true-believer admininstrators who used to “persuade” faculty gently to engage in assessment (usually successfully).You heard it here first!P.S. Here is a test for one’s seriousness about assessment. Consider how much and what kinds of assessments are done at the Ivies, or MIT, CalTech, etc. Do you really think these institutions care enough about what the Feds and regional accrediation bodies think of them and what they do? Or would ever worry about losing accreditation becasue they don’t do enough assessment to please a regional accreditor? Hardly! Assessment and assessment culture has become (it did not start that way) a form of academic colonialism in which the imperialist designs of external bodies, obedient to governmenal officials, beleaguered taxpayers and self-proclaimed experts, imposed their educational ideas and ideals upon the less well off colleges, wasting the time and patience of legions…

I see the main conflict arising from a difference of expectations between the public (which is what legislators, accreditors, and ‘administrators’) react to, and traditional faculty culture. The public expects to invest in institutions of higher education through legislative appropriations, tuition, and federal student aid programs, and in return it expects to receive a certain number of educated individuals capable of contributing to society. Faculty expect the reward for the implied contract that they entered when earning their doctorates which is students willing to take responsibility for their educations, and to have a place to profess their ideas about their fields, live the life of the mind (including research), and have students learn as a side-effect of that process. Essentially the public went to the market, asked for an apple and got handed an orange because the faculty believe that’s what they bargained for. Ultimately this disconnect needs to be resolved, and unfortunately for many faculty, state legislators and the dept. of Ed. do not fund higher education programs with the intent of finding the next greatest insight into Poe’s work, or a cure for cancer (that’s the NEA, NIH, and NSF’s jobs). They purchase the labor of faculty (even if the funding is relatively paltry) for the purpose of obtaining education, not research, and not the supervision of TA’s. Does this mean a decline in the richness of thought and progress within the academy? Probably, but it probably wasn’t as great as everyone thinks it was to begin with, after all, it’s been less than a century since the research institution with all of its trappings and comforts for faculty really was popularized, and maybe it’s just a temporary phenomenon. The sooner we come to terms with this possibility, the sooner we can all get back to the core mission of education.

My biggest issue is that I am required to do assessment, but I can get very little guidance as to what that should mean for me. I am not a classroom instructor. I run a large learning center. I am told I must assess, so I dutifully visit the campus assessment guru, who gives me very generalized philosophical language about assessment and then a series of examples relevant to classroom assessment but not to me. And from that point, I must fend for myself. I bring examples I have found from other colleges, and generally those examples are shot down as not applicable here. I object to certain suggestions as being so focused on gathering data that they miss the point that there are HUMAN STUDENTS WITH FEELINGS involved. All of this should be about the students– not the data. If we ask them to do something that generates data for us, and the thing is so unpalatable or burdensome that it makes students not want to come here anymore, then we have constructed a barrier between services and students who need them.My other issue is that there is no heed paid to the huge increase in workload that comes with planning and executing outcomes assessment outside the classroom. This means developing and deploying instruments, collecting the data from them, analyzing the data, and writing all of this up in reports whose formats, lengths, and other requirements change from semester to semester and year to year, with NO increase in budget or staffing to get this all done. The administration just drops the bomb on us and looks the other way while we buckle under the burden.

Immanuel Kant lived from 1724 until 1804, some years after the 16th century CE.

Having fun yet?

Alichtens…thanks for the affirmation. Someone indeed needs to assess the assessors. Just as important, which accrediting bodies, if any, assess the effectiveness of their accreditation standards? What evidence do they collect and publish, ascertaining whether and to what extent their standards accomplish what they were designed to accomplish (e.g., does the application of their standards truly make a particular college “better”? If so, how?) Until we see this from the Feds, accreditors and State Education Boards, we will continue to find ourselves awash in a sea of hypocrisy and onerous unfunded mandates.I sometimes imagine the following cutesy “conversation” in which a Representative from Middles States (regional accrediting body) visits with a Cornell Dean:Representative: Mr. Dean, your college does not produce enough empirical evidence demonstrating that your students have achieved learning objectives in program X and have not thereby prima facie sufficiently benefitted from their academic experience. Neither do you use the scant information that you have to close the feedback loop and, in so doing, determine what modifications in the curriculum, if any, need to be made for its improvement. Here is some formative and summative learning assessment literature from Angelo and Banta you can read and share with your faculty that may be helpful to them in doing a better assessments.Cornell Dean: GTF off my campus!

@bbuchner:Not true… some of us actually DO know our stuff, and approach it with sensitivity and urgency.I have never held tenure, so therefore I am not qualified to run an assessment initiative? Hogwash! In a like manner, it is equally silly to presume that all administrators have never been in a classroom, or are so far removed from the processes associated with education. But perhaps ou know far more about my background than I do… in that case, please tell me more about what I do not know? Enquiring minds want to know.@11134525:As for the Cornell story, well I offer that there are dogmatic pedagogues with megalomaniacal agendi in every field. This does not excuse it, but it happens. You are free to disagree of course, but then I prompt you to look at the professorate…Listening to/reading the horror stories, and the resultant conclusions of the educated professors who frequent this venue, I am shocked that one bad experience is used to define a lifetime of attitudes…. How very scientific we all are. I hope that this type of thinking continues to pervade every aspect of your professional careers, and nets you lots of publications.

Gadfly, my response to your last comment is, that’s right, dude, you have no business telling me how to assess my students. I do that constantly, you don’t, and so you have no idea what I’m about. Hands off.But I won’t say that, because I think you made a very good point in your first post–it’s our fault. It’s our fault in not paying attention when all this was a-borning. We weren’t really looking when administrative types and their faculty lackeys were pontificating about the glories of assessment to Congress and state legislatures. We didn’t band together and come out in force to educate legislators about the real problems in higher education. (Lack of student assessment isn’t even in the top ten.) We didn’t complain loud and long about the steady decline in the quality of training of college freshmen who were, after all, products of our high schools. We didn’t find the time to lash back against the slow descent of university administration into deadening hierarchy and anti-intellectual corporatism that now defines it. Nor did we say much about the increasing burden of assessment and other such busy-work that administrations, despite their own bloat, offloaded onto faculty.So I confess. It’s our fault. We were nose-to-the-grindstone, maintaining the world’s best system of higher education. Now, how we ever did that without constant, fingernails-on-the-chalkboard pressure to assess, assess, assess–I do declare, I’ll never know.

Let me throw in a hatenote. The worst assessment tool (student course evaluation) I’ve seen is the Id*ea Form, which combines faux-rigor with touchy-feely, including some non-empirically backed assumptions about teaching that have never been proven– e.g. how wonderful it is to use groups. Junk. Administrators are seduced by this cra*p because it can be “nationally normed.”

I have another problem. I am quite confident that a student who gets a B or better in one of my classes has met all the course objectives.What about the C and D students? They got these grades because they fail to prove their mastery of the course materials. We let them pass because they still know more than the people that we fail. Ideally, we should check that these students have at least met the course minimum objectives, whatever these are. I do not think that most of us do that and I believe that doing it would result in many more F grades.