As I write this sentence, the team from the Middle States Commission on Higher Education is visiting Widener University for our ten-year reaccreditation review.
The customary meeting with the members of the board of trustees is scheduled primarily to ensure that trustees are well informed about institutional practices and are holding the administration and faculty accountable for all sorts of quality assurances.
In preparation for their meeting with accreditors, board members naturally wanted to know the critical concerns for an accrediting body: advancement of the mission, faculty welfare, access to and availability of resources, healthy shared governance, fiscal responsibility, student welfare, curricular oversight, and planning.
No problem.
Oh, and of course, assessment.
Assessment? Though at one time I might have anticipated that the board would have responded with a bit of confusion, I am happy to report that our trustees not only were able but eager to talk about the topic with our site team. That said, not all boards might be so knowledgeable.
Given the corporate and financial backgrounds of many board members, it helps that our board understands that assessment in the learning arena is parallel to a financial audit by the IRS or the SEC: Those agencies’ audits check the veracity of an organization’s claims about money coming and going in ways that are legal, efficient, and sound. Similarly, assessment is the check on the veracity of a college or university’s claims about the teaching of content, behaviors, and skills.
In short, assessment is the intense investigation of whether our students are learning what we are teaching.
The board’s fiduciary, planning, and other strategic responsibilities may give trustees little time to invest in the academic conversations that swirl around a university campus. And given the jealously guarded nature of curricular decision making, this traditional lack of involvement may sit just fine with many academic administrators and faculty.
But if one of the critical roles of the board is to ensure the overall quality and sustainability of an institution in light of its mission, enrollment, and efficient uses of resources, then it is hard to argue in today’s climate of increased accountability that what happens on the “academic side of the house” is beyond the purview of board responsibilities.
Why the Urgency? In a time of skepticism and scandal—in the government, in corporate America, and in the church—it is no small wonder that higher education also is drawing its share of critiques about its operations and results. The budgeting and executive compensation practices of a few institutions have raised concerns about customs at all colleges and universities, and skepticism about how well our students are learning is on the rise.
What, exactly, should our students know at the end of their college years? And how do we know they have learned what we say they should have learned? What can they do with that knowledge and those skills? And is what they have learned appropriate for the outcomes we value?
Thanks largely to the perceived importance of a college education for enhancing income potential and critical thinking skills, this unease about the actual, measurable quality of a college education is a hot topic for educators, legislators, donors, parents, and students themselves. Fortunately, it also is a hot topic for responsible faculty who believe they can address and allay skeptics’ concerns. But many in higher education are resistant to the louder calls for greater public accountability.
Historically, of course, those of us who work in the academic realm have routinely questioned students about their satisfaction with their learning experiences, with their faculty interactions, and with the type of employment they find after graduation. We have surveyed students’ employers to determine their satisfaction with our graduates. And we have used proxies, such as alumni giving rates, to ascertain some level of commitment and satisfaction.
Now, many of us are trying to move into a deeper conversation about how to provide tangible evidence of actual learning. Beyond standardized testing, which frequently is the exclusive measure of learning, we now realize that learning is far more complex than performance on a single standardized test.
As most employers will admit, how a student performed on a test is not nearly as important as how he or she performs in the workplace. Measuring that performance at strategic points in a student’s educational journey (when deficiencies can be remedied) and then at the end of that voyage are key elements of contemporary thinking in the studentassessment movement. These elements are defining the culture of evidence we seek to establish in higher education.
Assessment and Mission. There is widespread recognition that different institutions exist for different purposes: Some exist for what amounts to “just in time” education designed to prepare a ready workforce, others for lifelong educational expectations that serve far more than the requirements of any specific job or career.
By truly understanding the institution’s mission and why it offers certain curricula to specific types of students, trustees can better understand why most higher education leaders are dissatisfied with a one-size-fits-all approach to student-learning assessments that were a key part of the work of the Spellings Commission on the Future of Higher Education and now are being debated by federal officials in Washington.
Standardized testing appeals to many people who believe it is important and possible to compare how well institutions are performing in educating students and measuring the results. Yet the complications of using a single standard become starker when we realize the innumerable variables among higher education providers: size of student population, student academic profile, size of endowment, type of facilities, mission, range of curricular offerings, depth of academic support services, quality of co-curricular offerings, and historical and current affiliations, to name a few.
In recognition of these differences, educators increasingly are looking to the practices of authentic assessment—developed within the context of each institution’s mission, curricular specializations, educational vision, and other distinctive qualities—to ask important questions about student-learning outcomes. Faculty members asked to articulate their expectations for students’ knowledge and abilities will be able to point to specific educational values and the correlating knowledge or skills that demonstrate those values.
In determining the extent to which students have mastered information and skills, institutions are now looking to various forms of evidence—portfolios that showcase students’ work and allow for a fuller picture of their knowledge and abilities, projects that allow students to demonstrate their ability to apply their knowledge, and internships and cooperative educational experiences in which students sustain the application of their knowledge in a work environment.
One of the principal values of institutionally based assessment is the opportunity to question, deeply, the institution’s values. As an example, almost every four-year institution has a general education program, yet such programs differ remarkably from campus to campus. Quite simply, the context of any given institution (its culture, values, programs, students, and so forth) should drive the answer to the question, “What does it mean to be ‘generally educated’ in the 21st century?”
Not surprisingly, a science and technology institution will answer the question differently from a performing arts institution or from an institution that promotes civic engagement. Similarly, a research-extensive institution will answer differently from a baccalaureate one. And an institution that aspires to a “metropolitan” mission will answer differently from a rural, agricultural institution. The allowance of difference is at the heart of the strategic decisions about assessment—what should be assessed, how it should be assessed, and the critical points in a student’s development at which assessments should occur.
Further, including students in the conversations about institutional values and, ultimately, how those values are embedded in their curricular (in-class) and co-curricular (out-of-class) experiences provides a meaningful opportunity to make students true partners in their educational journey—as fully vested but carefully guided decision makers, rather than receptacles of institutional wisdom.
Questions for Boards. Accreditation bodies are discipline-specific (they focus on a certain program, such as education, business, nursing, and so forth) or regional, which focus on the entire institution. Most accreditation agencies require some form of assessment, though some are more demanding than others. For a board member whose responsibilities include monitoring issues that can affect enrollment, resource distribution, institutional image, and institutional stability, it is appropriate to inquire about the types, processes, and uses of learning assessments conducted at your institution. In particular, the board and administration might consider the following:
What institutionwide, general education, and/or cross-curricular learning goals have been articulated as indicative of our institution’s mission? If we accept that colleges and universities provide different educational experiences based on different educational values and missions, campus officials should be able to articulate those differences as educational objectives within the context of their institution’s values and mission. For example: Students will be able to apply the rudimentary technology that supports their major discipline of study. Or students will be able to describe the issues surrounding social justice as it applies to their major discipline of study. Or students will be able to describe and demonstrate their problemsolving abilities in the context of increasingly complicated dilemmas common to their major discipline of study.
How is evidence of student learning being collected? In other words, what is the process by which students demonstrate and document their knowledge and skills? In addition to tests and papers, examples of such processes include portfolios of collected works, artistic presentations that demonstrate particular techniques, or research projects that provide evidence of following the scientific method.
How is the evidence evaluated and by whom? Faculty may sit on juries or panels, sometimes along with external evaluators (employers, faculty from other institutions, and practitioners) to review students’ work. Quite often, these reviewers will assign a set of criteria to help them articulate the level of development of the students’ knowledge or abilities, ranging from, say, “rudimentary” to “mastery.”
How is that evidence reported and to whom? While the results of various assessments may be reported to the academic affairs committee of the board, it is far more important that the results be reported and discussed at the program and department level so faculty and deans understand issues concerning quality within their curriculum and the need for stability or improvement. The regularity of such reports is equally important, and many faculties have established routine retreats to review the results of assessment work and plans for incorporating changes.
How is evidence used to improve the curriculum, co-curriculum, or other aspects of students’ experiences? Faculty and deans should be able to articulate what they have learned from such exercises and how they have worked to improve students’ educational development. For instance, based on assessment results, some faculty have revised the order of their curriculum; others have introduced or enhanced important topics; and others have deleted topics or entire courses that proved either redundant or irrelevant to student learning.
All of these kinds of actions demonstrate faculty responsibility for ensuring a robust curriculum that promotes student success, while maximizing available resources.
Don’t Overstep Boundaries. Obviously, assessment of the curriculum and co-curriculum are tasks that reside in the hands of faculty. A healthy respect for academic freedom and the role of the faculty in designing, implementing, and assessing the curriculum goes a long way in ensuring that proper boundaries are observed. That said, the board, without telling the faculty what they should teach and assess, must ascertain that quality indeed is being measured and how this is occurring.
At a minimum, the board’s interest in what the faculty values and what it teaches our students should provide an illuminating conversation, as it did recently when the accreditation team came to Widener. Even more profitably, it should enhance a shared vision of how the institution embraces accountability and, thus, how it will move forward in the years ahead.
