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AAHE
Principles
Learning
Goals
GE
Outcomes
Guidelines
for
Assessment
California
State University, Sacramento |
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
continous 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 continous 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
This document was
developed in 1996 under the auspices of the AAHE
Assessment Forum with support from the Fund for the
Improvement of Postsecondary Education with additional
support for publication and dissemination from the Exxon
Education Foundation. Copies may be made without
restriction.
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