Guest Writers

Here are a couple questions to ponder at the start of the Spring 2008 semester. I know, a pop quiz right out of the gate – how mean is that? But I think you’ll at least get a 50% and that’s better than a 0, right?

Question 1: How was your holiday break?
Question 2: How do you know?

Which was more difficult to answer? I could have made them multiple guess, but that would have skewed the results. Essential point number 1: Assessment can be a difficult process. How do we quantify how we feel about something? It’s not likely anyone created a rubric for holiday success (4 points: Consumed plenty of food without getting sick. 3 points: Consumed a lot of food and only became a little sick. 2 points: Consumed a week’s worth of food in one sitting and was pretty sick. 1 point: You get the idea…) but when someone asks us we can typically come up with some sort of an answer regarding how we felt about our holiday.

If only it were that straight forward when we are asked if our students have increased in critical thinking skills or if they improved as writers. There is ample evidence that higher education is increasingly being asked to answer these questions (Google “Spellings Commission” for an example). Essential point number 2: Increased scrutiny of how higher education handles assessment is here for the foreseeable future.

Here is another question to ponder – how should assessment impact evaluation? Is this a trick question? Aren’t assessment and evaluation essentially the same thing? Yes and no. I’m defining assessment as the process of determining degrees of success (to what degree did I succeed in keeping last year’s New Year’s Resolutions? To what degree did my students demonstrate comprehension and application of the concepts taught?). However, I would define evaluation as gathering feedback – of which assessment is a key form – with the goal of making improvement. Enough prevaricating around the bush. What I really am asking is should student performance on assessments impact evaluations of faculty performance? Essential point number 3: Student assessment already impacts evaluations of faculty performance – as it should. The unfortunate aspect of this truth is not that evaluation and assessment are tied together but that there are too few and often weak “data points” used in the typical evaluation of faculty performance (be it on our campus, in our state or across the nation). The typical use for the combination of assessment and evaluation is for summative and consequential results. Instead, by swinging the pendulum in the other direction, the two should be used for formative purposes instrumental to improving the process of higher education.

Is there a final answer and point to all these questions? In this spring semester let us focus on the best ways to assess our work properly and how to use that assessment to inform our evaluations of the work being done. It is one thing to say we’re doing a good job (and that we enjoyed our holiday) but the times require for us to say explicitly why we know this to be true.

With all this in mind let me make a plug for the first of our upcoming CTELT brown bag lunches on February 5th where John Heinrichs will share “Using rubrics and student peer review to help improve student writing and grading fairness” (while we enjoy a free lunch!).

Now I’m off to create a rubric for Spring Break satisfaction.