Larryc, thanks.
There may be value to assessment of which I am unaware. There is absolutely no value to it the way my institution is doing it, and it is being pushed and controlled by the very worst elements on my campus.
I'm familiar enough with the trend that I know what you mean; I have been frustrated to attend workshops and hear about others that were full of misinformation presented as requirements, and some people just love to tell others what is and isn't assessment, as if they actually knew. It's a power thing, isn't it?
If you don't have to do it, great. Apparently some colleges are able to meet accreditation requirements without actually having professors do any of it in the classroom, or they manage to put it off for now. But if you
do have to do it, you might as well do it in a way that works for you. I'm sorry to keep repeating myself, but the whole thread seems stuck in victim mode (they're doing this to us and we don't have any power over it) and I don't think faculty are natural victims.
I'm not saying that outcomes assessment is necessarily a good or bad thing. The way it's being implemented seems overwhelmingly negative. But the accreditation standards themselves generally just say something like "The institution uses established procedures to design, identify student learning outcomes for, approve, administer, deliver and evaluate courses and programs." I took that from the regional accreditation organization I'm most familiar with, WASC/ACCJC's Standard Two, Part A (
http://www.wascweb.org), which goes on to talk about the role of faculty in instructional quality and about ongoing assessment and evaluation. Now, that's bureaucratese, but it doesn't require a college to implement outcomes assessment in any particularly onerous or byzantine way; they do that all on their own, and since it's done locally, it can be fought locally.
But personally, I've found outcomes assessment useful, perhaps because the people telling me how to do it haven't had any power over me so I've done it my way. Here's what I do, and in describing it I'm not saying anyone else should
have to do it as well, or that there aren't ten other equally effective methods. I'm just telling you what I mean, specifically, when I talk about outcomes assessment in classes I teach.
I write what I want the students to be able to do by the end of the course as my outcomes, and I include things that I/all the faculty want them to be working on to be able to do by the end of their program. These are not discrete "competencies" (have you heard that word? Perhaps not if you're in the humanities, you might be lucky in that at least) but rather more complex. Things like:
Construct a well-reasoned argument using relevant evidence from course readings and other credible documents.
and
Produce competent academic writing with attention to scholarly tone, vocabulary, formatting and citations.
Demonstrate behavior that contributes to a positive and productive learning environment.
Those are off the top of my head so they'd probably need revision, but most instructors want students to be able to do something like that, and they know what it looks like when the students do it. I let the students know what it looks like using the dreaded R-word (yes, rubrics).
That last outcome, the one about behavior, seems to be unique to me but I think it's incredibly important. Take a look at all the topics about student behavior, and the employer complaints about "indigo children" as new employees--some of these students don't know how to behave and they need to learn it somewhere. It works for me to make it part of the formal course outcomes, acknowledge that they need to learn it, and include it in the grade rather than making it a separate category called classroom management problems.
As for assessment, I tell the students that it is their job to show me that they have mastered the course outcomes with multiple pieces of evidence (another of the outcomes I use is about self-assessment and learning to recognize what they know and what they still don't understand). I give assignments and a take-home midterm (and I see their writing enough to recognize when it's not theirs), but they can also print out and include their online discussion contributions as evidence of their mastery of an outcome, as well as including homework, papers, and projects. I give project options and have them choose and come up with a plan that will be interesting to them, give them ample opportunities to learn what they need to know, and produce the evidence they need. And I grade them on what they turn in. If they turn in 4 pieces of evidence that they can "construct a well-reasoned argument..." then they get the points for that toward their grade; if they do it, but not so well, the grade's a little lower. I don't care if they got a D on a quiz the first week of the course; if they knew it all coming in they wouldn't need to be there. I care that they can consistently do what I've described in the outcomes, at least at an adequate level of proficiency, by the end of the course. If they can, they get the grade consistent with that level of achievement.
That works for me because students know what they're supposed to learn, and it puts a lot of the responsibility for learning it, and documenting what they can do, on them. It doesn't require more work on my part than the usual approach, though I don't/didn't have big classes so I can't speak to that. I think that for many faculty, it's an entirely different way of looking at instruction, but you should see how involved the students get, how much they learn, how much responsibility they take, and how they remember and keep learning. I've had students come up to me months later and tell me they're still thinking about what they learned (I know, so have a lot of you using whatever methods you use). I've also had faculty tell me they can see the difference in skills in the next class those students take. So that's what I'm talking about when I say outcomes assessment.
Pyshnov, I don't know the history of it, and it doesn't matter to me. In terms of the big picture, I imagine the forces for standardized testing are gearing up their lobbying in hopes of taking over when outcomes assessment dies out. As long as people are taking out tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans to pay for higher education, they're going to want some
kind of semblance of public accountability, and if they can't get it this way, they'll probably want the standardized testing.
Sorry that was so long. Time for bed.
