Office of Institutional Research, Assessment, and Analytics
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Principles of Assessment
Nine Principles of Good Practice for Assessing Student Learning
- The assessment of student learning begins with educational values. Assessment is not an end in itself but a vehicle for educational improvement. Its effective practice, then, begins with and enacts a vision of the kinds of learning we most value for students and strive to help them achieve. Educational values should drive not only what we choose to assess but also how we do so. Where questions about educational mission and values are skipped over, assessment threatens to be an exercise in measuring what's easy, rather than a process of improving what we really care about.
- Assessment is most effective when
it reflects an understanding of learning as multidimensional, integrated,
and revealed in performance over time. Learning is a complex process. It entails not only
what students know but what they can do with what they know; it involves
not only knowledge and abilities but values, attitudes, and habits of mind
that affect both academic success and performance beyond the classroom.
Assessment should reflect these understandings by employing a diverse
array of methods, including those that call for actual performance, using
them over time so as to reveal change, growth, and increasing degrees of
integration. Such an approach aims for a more complete and accurate
picture of learning, and therefore firmer bases for improving our
students' educational experience.
- Assessment works best when the
programs it seeks to improve have clear, explicitly stated purposes. Assessment is a goal-oriented
process. It entails comparing educational performance with educational
purposes and expectations -- those derived from the institution's mission,
from faculty intentions in program and course design, and from knowledge
of students' own goals. Where program purposes lack specificity or
agreement, assessment as a process pushes a campus toward clarity about
where to aim and what standards to apply; assessment also prompts
attention to where and how program goals will be taught and learned.
Clear, shared, implementable goals are the cornerstone for assessment that
is focused and useful.
- Assessment requires attention to
outcomes but also and equally to the experiences that lead to those
outcomes. Information
about outcomes is of high importance; where students "end up"
matters greatly. But to improve outcomes, we need to know about student
experience along the way -- about the curricula, teaching, and kind of
student effort that lead to particular outcomes. Assessment can help us
understand which students learn best under what conditions; with such
knowledge comes the capacity to improve the whole of their learning.
- Assessment works best when it is
ongoing not episodic. Assessment is a process whose power is cumulative. Though isolated,
"one-shot" assessment can be better than none, improvement is
best fostered when assessment entails a linked series of activities
undertaken over time. This may mean tracking the process of individual
students, or of cohorts of students; it may mean collecting the same
examples of student performance or using the same instrument semester
after semester. The point is to monitor progress toward intended goals in
a spirit of continuous improvement. Along the way, the assessment process
itself should be evaluated and refined in light of emerging insights.
- Assessment fosters wider
improvement when representatives from across the educational community are
involved. Student
learning is a campus-wide responsibility, and assessment is a way of
enacting that responsibility. Thus, while assessment efforts may start
small, the aim over time is to involve people from across the educational
community. Faculty play an especially important
role, but assessment's questions can't be fully addressed without
participation by student-affairs educators, librarians, administrators,
and students. Assessment may also involve individuals from beyond the
campus (alumni/ae, trustees, employers) whose
experience can enrich the sense of appropriate aims and standards for
learning. Thus understood, assessment is not a task for small groups of
experts but a collaborative activity; its aim is wider, better-informed
attention to student learning by all parties with a stake in its
improvement.
- Assessment makes a difference when
it begins with issues of use and illuminates questions that people really
care about. Assessment
recognizes the value of information in the process of improvement. But to
be useful, information must be connected to issues or questions that
people really care about. This implies assessment approaches that produce
evidence that relevant parties will find credible, suggestive, and applicable
to decisions that need to be made. It means thinking in advance about how
the information will be used, and by whom. The point of assessment is not
to gather data and return "results"; it is a process that starts
with the questions of decision-makers, that involves them in the gathering
and interpreting of data, and that informs and helps guide continuous
improvement.
- Assessment is most likely to lead
to improvement when it is part of a larger set of conditions that promote
change. Assessment
alone changes little. Its greatest contribution comes on campuses where
the quality of teaching and learning is visibly valued and worked at. On
such campuses, the push to improve educational performance is a visible
and primary goal of leadership; improving the quality of undergraduate
education is central to the institution's planning, budgeting, and
personnel decisions. On such campuses, information about learning outcomes
is seen as an integral part of decision making, and avidly sought.
- Through assessment, educators meet
responsibilities to students and to the public. There is a compelling public
stake in education. As educators, we have a responsibility to the publics that support or depend on us to provide
information about the ways in which our students meet goals and
expectations. But that responsibility goes beyond the reporting of such
information; our deeper obligation -- to ourselves, our students, and
society -- is to improve. Those to whom educators are accountable have a
corresponding obligation to support such attempts at improvement.
Authors
Alexander W. Astin; Trudy W. Banta; K. Patricia Cross; Elaine El-Khawas; Peter T. Ewell; Pat
Hutchings; Theodore J. Marchese; Kay M. McClenney; Marcia Mentkowski;
Margaret A. Miller; E. Thomas Moran; Barbara D. Wright
American Association for Higher
Education & Accreditation (formerly AAHE)
This document was
developed under the auspices of the AAHEA Assessment Forum (Barbara Cambridge is Director) with support from the Fund for the
Improvement of Post-Secondary Education with additional support for publication
and dissemination from the Exxon Education Foundation. Copies may be made
without restriction.