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You probably saw it in the Chronicle of Higher Education (October 27, 2009) in the comments of George Kuh, director of the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment. He makes several observations that align with our experience, reading, and thinking. He notes, for instance, that “what we want is for assessment to become a public, shared responsibility, so there should be departmental leadership” (paragraph 14).
He also notes that lots of places have developed outcomes, however:
“What’s still disconcerting is that I don’t see a lot of evidence of closing the loop. There’s a lot of data around, there’s some evidence it’s being used in a variety of ways, but we still don’t know if that information is being transferred in such a way as to change practices for the better. That’s still the place where we’re falling short” (paragraph 6).
Part of the reason closing the loop is so difficult is that outcomes assessment remains removed from what faculty do in their classrooms. (There’s a nice piece in Inside Higher Ed today on this, but this post is already too long.) So what we’ve learned that tends to work better and is generally most practical is to put the focus on what faculty are already doing.
Peter Ewell, the VP of The National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, came to a similar conclusion that resonates with our experience and suggests a strategy for making outcomes assessment truly “practical” or “functional” for closing the loop. Lamenting the failure of more than 10 years of the assessment reform in helping institutions and faculty close the loop, Ewell says:
“I have learned two additional lessons about the slippery matter of articulating abilities. First, it’s more useful to start with the actual practice of the ability than with the stated outcome. Phrases like ‘intellectual agility’ have great charm, but mean little in the absence of an actual student performance that might demonstrate them. To construct assessment techniques, formal assessment design, as described in the textbooks, demands ever more detailed verbal specifications of the outcomes or competencies to be developed. But it is often more helpful to go the other way. Given a broad general descriptor like ‘intellectual agility,’ can you imagine a very concrete situation in which somebody might display this ability, and how they might actually behave? Better still, can you quickly specify the parameters of an assignment or problem that might demand a particular level of ability for access? The performance that the student exhibits on the assessment is the definition of the ability itself; the ability has no independent existence” (pp. 6, 2004, General Education and the Assessment Reform Agenda).
We’ve worked with a couple of dozen programs here at WSU (and more than a few elsewhere) and found that starting with the real and embedded assignments faculty use is an effective way to approach outcomes assessment. It helps programs refine and make concrete their understanding of outcomes in the context of their own teaching. It helps them close the loop as reflected in their own assignment design.
Given the ever increasing pressure to demonstrate outcomes educators all face, and in the interests on building outcomes assessment systems in the day-to-day work in which faculty are already engaged, starting with activities faculty already use is what will give us the best, well, outcome;-)
