a/b the “In this spirit. . .” parasgraph — my experience says this works.

This previous comment reflects the attitude of too many educators. I beg to differ! We MUST make the time! Without formarive, summative and ongoing multiple varieies of assessment and its IMMEDIATE feedback school reform will not occur.I teach 3 developmental courses at a college, own my own businesses, actually 2, and am taking doctoral courses in Teaching & Learning for Higher Education. Your report on last year’s placement of graduates is a priority how? GRading and its immediate feedback does belong in the here and now as does faculty assessment. I am so tired of PH D and Ed D who have NO TIME for the real meat of their jobs and responsibilities.LASt semester I submitted 3 major projects totlaing nearly 1/3 of the entire 78 weeks course points. I did not get one word of feedback, just the grades! The reason, “I have no time!” HOw does that value me as a student or a colleague. Make the time!

And comment #4 completely misses the irony of comment #3, so let me explain: rpm13 is saying he/she is ALREADY swamped with assessment of student learning and lists three examples of legitimate forms of such assessment.Even without the supplied description of your background, your lack of reading comprehension had pegged you as someone from either business or education, both of which tend increasingly to produce higher ed administrators.

We have an opportunity here, to “teach our administrators well” if I may misquote a key cultural artifact from my youth. :-)Show them the value of multiple measures of the same same phenomenon. Bring the paragraph from a research methods text that explains it. Talk about accumulated levels of proficiency in these essential skills. Show them that presentation from the national conference that describes undergraduate learning.They can’t be experts in everything, but we can help them understand the value of good measurement possibly leading to good use of resources. We’re educators: spreading that wealth is what we do.

At the risk of oversimplifying: The problem is that all too often we SEPARATE assessment from teaching and learning – it’s like “Here’s assessment over here, and here’s teaching and learning over there.” Explained and viewed in that way, no wonder faculty believe they “don’t have time” for assessment (i.e., because it is APART from their primary concerns). Faculty development efforts that genuinely emphasize that teaching, learning, and assessment are inherently inter-related and in fact inseparable will resonate with faculty. Other attempts to stimulate faculty interest in assessment culture will not, and rightly so.

@rpm13:Preparing a placement report of last years graduates IS an assessment: it places the results of your labors (the grads) into a larger context, rife with uncontrollable external factors to be sure (cruddy economy etc), but still useful. Feedback from grads can help inform the changes (if any) you make to the curriculum down the road.@Valrie:I really know of nothing that says assessment data must be used immediately (my mind pictures Governor Pettigout from Blazing Saddles), so if your assessment guru is pushing this agenda, perhaps you hired poorly.Yes, assessment has been going on for years,and we all do it, somewhat instinctively to be sure. What has NOT been evident is the documentation of HOW it is used. I believe that I am doing a good job, and that things are going better, so I will just tell everyone that everything is ok. Oh wait, is that not what every government does? And we idley sit by and accept it?@cjones599:Grades in and of themeselves are not direct evidence of student learning. They are indicators lf learning. I fear that your campus as well, did not hire well ini the assessment arena. What faculty do in the classroom is test on the material presented. Do they just assign a paper and give it all in one fell swoop? Or do they assign the paper in smaller portions that can be reviewed, and eventually concatonated into a final product? Some faculty do this, some do not. Not all should in fact. Another point is that not everyone has to play the assessment game all the time. In fact, if a few do not wish to participate, they are certainly free to sit it out. Oh, should they decide to sit on the sidelines, they are obligated to not interfere or undermine the process, but unfortunately, some must engage in obfusticating progress, for whatever reason, but this behavior is neither professorial, nor collegial, and should be duly noted in their dossier. You have the right to not participate, but if your whole department opts out, and the institution is under a mandate to move forward, then someone will do it for them. At that point, it is too late to complain, as you had ample opportunity to shape your assessment strategies – ones that meet YOUR needs – so now an outsider has to come in and handle matters.

The more immediate and frequent the iterative feedback the more likely it will cause a negative correction of any system, making it worse, not better. This kind of knee-jerk plowing back into the system of the weeds the plow just dug up only spreads bad seed, and bad quality will drive out good (Gresham’s Law in economics). This kind of assessment is inherently flawed if it is to improve any system since it includes a sliding standard of ever-changing reference normed against no gold standard. Paradoxical and perverse results of unanticipated but very real consequences make even more assessment the only result, assessment that but perpetuates the problem. Contrast this with considered, long-term experience as a foundational standard of measurement against which short term practices are measured. Senior faculty could provide this if they would. Careerism of younger faculty and administrators doesn’t help either.TQM and other engineering models are well-suited for objects but not for social systems. As far as Deming giving students multiple retakes and time extensions for assignments, that has the untoward effect of keeping them from moving on to other important items requiring their attention no less than his privileged homework.”Continuous quality improvement” is a slogan at our institution. What happens as far as I have seen is that staff offices that should be able to perform routine, perfunctory tasks in efficient and repetive fashion with high turnover rates timewise now take eons to get them done. They have blown them up out of proportion in the interest of “improving” how they are doing them and not what is being done. And in the interest of being able to market their commitment to a slogan. Complex tasks, on the other hand, rarely see any benefit whatever. This includes the limited timeframe which surrounds a 50 minute lecture period as well as the limited time before which another lecture must be prepared–inherent deadlines at least set a fortunate limit to blowing complex items up out of proportion to their worth. Continuous quality improvement is sloganeering no less than is assessment. Work expands the time there is to do it, and complex tasks such as teaching will never be accorded the amount of time it takes to do them better. And data collection is nothing but time consuming and detracts from primary functions. Not that anyone has much of a clue how to begin to actually assess what the amassed data means, data which may be skewed from the outset without our being aware of it.America is totally hung up on trying to be better. In the classroom this amounts to another variant of moral perfectionism, and likely emanates from religious roots from which we are not far removed. Student opinion surveys must improve semester after semester. I must get better and better each time, as though an individual faculty member was no different than successive generations of Olympic athletes who kept getting faster and faster until it was discovered they were using steroids to do so. I spoke louder, wrote more legibly, listened more closely to my class than last year. Than two years ago. But it’s not going to get much better next year or 10 years from now. From now on it is up to the student to sit closer, take better notes, and listen more closely. It doesn’t get better than this.Granted and unquestionably, in substandard institutions or school systems that lack any conscientious will on the part of there faculties, administrations, or students, something must be done. It is questionable whether it is assessment, however. Why study a problem to death when we already know there is one? As far as quality institutions which have demonstrated track-records, leave them alone. They didn’t get where they are by assessment as it has come to evolve in its current obsessive form.Nietszche said governing and education were impossible professions. Freud added psychoanalysis. This doesn’t mean that it is impossible to exercise the profession of teaching, for example, but that the profession will ultimately meet with an impossibility in its exercise. And you can’t do anything about that. It is inherent within any system that there are internal limits. Unfortunately, we narcissistic, consumer-addicted Americans want things better, cheaper, and at our convenience, be if fast food, information at a mouseclick, instant friends on portable electronic devices accompanying them to their bathroom functions, etc. “Having it All: Love, Success, Sex, Money Even If You’re Starting With Nothing” was Helen Gurley Brown’s during her realization in her 1982 book. We “had it good” at one point in our history and knew well what we were about because we could tolerate the impossibility inherent in what we did. Somewhere we came to believe that we were invincible and that nothing could stop us or would stop us from perfectionism for us and our children. Traditional education, as superior as it was at the time, could but pale by comparison. Case in point: Pashler, et al, 2009 paper “Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence,” Psychological Science in the Public Interest, Vol 9, 3, 105 -118.There is no evidence whatever in the literature that meets the most minimal criteria that would verify that the classification of learning styles has any practical utility, let alone that faculties are to be teaching to them. Why, then, the spawing of for-profit entities convincing administrations and faculties and students, effectively drowning out objective research (or lack thereof) that clearly speaks to the matter? Pashler, et al put forward the following: (1) “It seems that the idea of finding out “what type of person one is” has some eternal and deep appeal.” In other words, individuals are looking for existence other than by merit; (2) Also, …”people are concerned that they, and their children, be seen and treated by educators as unique individuals.” Fine, but the ends do not correlate with the means in terms of teaching to different learning styles. Nevertheless, hope springs eternal and no off-the shelf commodity or instrument that one can teach to is too low to serve as a pretext for using it to fill an unfillable function; (3) “If a person or a person’s child is not succeeding or excelling in school, it may be more comfortable for the person to think that the educational system, not the person or the child himself or herself, is responsible.” In other words, blame someone else, and make them fix the unfixable. Such is the idea the public accountbility movement seems to have. Higher education has the function of providing an education, not job security for life for its graduates. But hope springs eternal that because we pay the tuition we are owed a lifetime maintainance agreement. It drives the assessment movement, causing us to adopt any strategy or philosophy no matter how unproven or how untested or how fallacious it may be in the longer run, just like the unknown longer term effects of long-term antidepressant usage that millions of Americans have come to rely on as de facto. As far as barriers to faculty involvement–maybe the faculty are the only barrier to misuse of this assessment nonsense taken to extreme. Conscientious faculty in the trenches might be more vocal on this matter were they not steamrollered into submission and held hostage to one-size-fit-all crude solutions to complex matters.Institutional efforts at massive grasping at straws thwarts us from more intelligent steering of the ship and understanding the human lack which can never be filled by organizational effort, but which human accountability on the part of faculties and students must address as part and parcel of our human condition. That accountability ultimately will require an ethical awareness, not data generation and its kneejerk and immediate plowing back into the system. “Garbage in, garbage out” is one apt slogan for this kind of activity.

@dboyles: So well said, beautifully intelligent. And data, too!@ der gadfly: No offense taken. You’re right, one can just shut up and do it, although you’d better do it the one-size-fits-all way, as instructed. I did that and I didn’t need any help with the jargon. I finally retired, mostly for personal reasons. But if there was anything about my job that nudged me along it was the mindlessness of formulaic strategic planning, outcomes assessment, and other such busywork that has never been demonstrated empirically to be improve higher education. That made me sad.