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9 Principles of Good Practice
for Assessing Student Learning
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- 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—these 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 over time
is best fostered when assessment entails a linked series 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
respirability 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.
These principles were developed 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. The authors are 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, and Barbara D. Wright.
Reproduced by permission of the publisher.
Copyright © 1991,
The American Association for Higher Education and
Copyright © 2005, by Stylus Publishing, LLC
source: http://www.iuk.edu/~koctla/assessment/9principles.shtml
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