When higher-ed administrators, trustees, accreditors, foundation officers, and the news media talk about assessing student learning, two voices are often conspicuously missing.

One is the voice of students themselves. (That’s not our topic today.)

The other is scholarly societies. The disciplinary associations in biology, political science, and history—to take just three examples—have well-established, large-scale programs aimed at assessing and improving the quality of instruction in their fields. Most disciplinary groups also publish journals dedicated to teaching and learning.

Not all of those discipline-level projects are great. Some are much better than others. The point here is simply that the projects exist, and that they reach thousands of faculty members every year. But they’re often weirdly ignored in national conversations about college quality.

Take, for example, the white paper on regional accreditors that we described here yesterday.

That paper ends with this statement: “While the accreditors may be major drivers for assessment, it would be far better for institutions themselves, as part of their cultures, to drive student-learning-outcomes assessment—to create a space for quality improvement independent of the pressures for accountability.”

Many faculty members would read that passage and raise their hands and say, “None of the above, please.” They don’t trust accreditation-driven assessment programs because they’re afraid that such projects would involve standardized tests and/or jargon-filled departmental reports that have little to do with what they’re actually trying to teach. And the idea of a local, college-level “culture of quality improvement” doesn’t sound much more appetizing.

But many of those same faculty members do trust their own disciplinary associations. A chemistry professor who cringes when her provost wheels in a quality-improvement consultant might be perfectly happy to spend hours talking with other chemistry instructors around the country about how to redesign labs and lectures.

That kind of discipline-level trust plays a role in this week’s Chronicle article about two departments’ efforts to improve the assessment of student learning.

The two projects—at Villanova’s college of engineering and Swarthmore’s classics department—aren’t so extraordinary in and of themselves. They’re part of the normal background hum of instructional change that goes on almost everywhere. But they’re interesting because, in both cases, they’ve been driven by national disciplinary conversations about how to understand and assess student learning. Neither department has acted because a regional accreditor or provost is breathing down its neck. (In this space tomorrow, we’ll look at the new Villanova engineering program in more detail.)

So should disciplinary associations play a bigger role in guaranteeing the quality of college instruction? Something like that already happens in engineering, where the specialized accrediting body known as ABET (whose annual meeting gets under way today in Baltimore) assesses departments using learning-outcome criteria that are developed by national committees of scholars and practicing engineers.

But in the humanities and social sciences there is (for perfectly legitimate reasons) much less consensus about what students should learn. It’s hard to imagine the Modern Language Association’s coming up with a learning-outcome list that is anywhere near as concrete and prescriptive as ABET’s lists. We aren’t likely to see ABET-style specialized accreditation in most undergraduate fields.

Even without full-blown specialized accreditation, however, the disciplinary associations could surely play a larger role in the national debate about student learning. One venue where that might happen is the Lumina Foundation for Education’s Tuning USA project, which has brought together faculty members from diverse institutions to construct basic lists of what students in particular fields should be expected to learn. The Tuning project is now almost two years old, and next month The Chronicle will take a look at its progress.