Two articles at @insidehighered today defending assessment from assessment professionals caused a handful of thoughts I figure I'd throw into the Twitter winds. insidehighered.com/views/2018/07/… insidehighered.com/views/2018/07/…
Similar to ed tech people, the people who work in assessment seem to feel besieged by faculty themselves who they believe are hostile to the work. Both articles claim faculty strawman assessment in an effort to discredit the entire scope of the work.
Of course this claim about faculty strawmannirg assessment is itself a strawman, but I think it points to the disconnects between assessment offices/professionals and instructional faculty. The assessment folks are dedicated, well-meaning, and they feel disrespected.
In my experience, faculty aren't hostile to assessment as a whole. I see class itself as a constant process of assessment and evaluation as I'm gauging what students are doing/learning against my own intentions. I believe in assessment, particularly self-assessment and reflection
But when that end-of-semester process where I turn in some sample student work that will go to a committee, read out of context and in isolation happens, that kind of assessment feels like pointless hoop jumping. The work stripped of its class context really feels meaningless.
Some of this is I teach writing so the notion that every student is going to learn the same thing seems off, given that they all start from different places, and are given great latitude to write on subjects of their own fascination. The artifacts often don't tell the story.
With writing, I'm as much or more interested in their attitudes and knowledge about their own writing process at the end of class as I am in the artifacts themselves. If they feel empowered and eager to keep developing. If they feel they have a process to work from, that's aces.
So the bureaucratic assessment I'm asked to do feels not only meaningless, but actively distorting of my intentions. Fortunately, I've never taught in a place where we were assessment-driven. It was okay to let the chips fall where they may, but that's not the case for all.
If I was required to teach towards improving my students' scores on the gen ed assessment rubrics used at the places I've worked, I'm convinced the students would learn less. It would flatten instruction the same way as standardized test-driven systems have done in K-12.
I think a big, maybe unsolvable problem is in the belief that this aggregated data of students will actually inform what we should be doing with individual students. Ed tech assessment tools promise a "snapshot" of how the institution is doing. Those snapshots are meaningless.
I'm not sure how to bridge this gap, but I'd like to see assessment that pays attention to the learning atmosphere, where we measure student self-perceived level of engagement, and considerations of the value of courses. Students know when they've experienced something meaningful
At the end of every class, I ask students to tell me what they learned. That's assessment. While there's always overlaps, it doesn't neatly collect into quantifiable data. I think narrative is an under appreciated part of assessment. It's certainly how I self-assess.
As well-meaning as those two essay are, neither is going to make faculty feel warmer toward institutional assessment. For my money, I'd like much more narrative from those working in assessment about specific assessment success stories.
I should've started by saying, I like assessment, I'm even a sort of former assessment professional, having been a marketing research consultant, but that work always made me suspicious of data absent narrative. We needed the qualitative findings to really tells us what #'s meant
