Higher Education’s Assessment Imperative
Posted on August 24, 2007 by David Gray
Not everyone in academia will agree with me, but in my view we must raise the bar concerning educational assessment at the college and university level, both within the traditional learning as well as online environments. We need more and better across-the-board evaluation frameworks that are fair, valid, compassionate, and qualitative as well as quantitatively measurable and comparable. Stakeholders at all levels want this, need this, and are increasingly less tolerant of our excuses.
It is of particular interest to me because e-learning institutions today are subject to a higher level of scrutiny by people on all sides of the issue. But I welcome that examination, and believe that more and more rigorous assessments of our processes and outcomes will accelerate and further distinguish the online option being offered today by leading institutions like UMassOnline… but I'm getting ahead of myself and my topic here.
Assessment is a big topic with many dimensions and layers. And it is rapidly gaining conversational momentum or buzz, you might say, nationwide in academic and government circles as well as among students and parents with a vested interest. What is it, exactly? In the simplest of terms it is a process by which we test educational outcomes to validate that learning is happening. That may sound straightforward, but the assessment debate today spans everything from whether or not an individual student is meeting course objectives and a class as a whole is performing to whether or not at the departmental, whole college and university system level we are achieving real results. For a more expansive definition and explanation of assessment you may wish to visit this Wikipedia offering which delves into the subject matter in greater depth. And, here is a link to a U.S. Department of Education site explaining why assessments matter to Federal policy-makers. Here's another to a site sponsored by the National Center for Education Evaluation.
Those opposed to high-stakes testing or assessment argue that the higher education curriculum is too diverse to be measured; that sophisticated courses are inherently not comparable or outcomes measurable, making assessment ridiculously difficult. They note that available resources in higher education are already scarce and cannot bear the burden of this additional task. And, they worry that an obsession with assessment may drive instructors to focus on a 'skill and drill' emphasis that takes time away from richer areas of exploration in the classroom. There is some truth in all of this. It is harder to evaluate courses as you go up the disciplinary ladder, for example. Upper division courses can be extremely idiosyncratic and wide curricular differentiation can and does exist between institutions. But just because assessment is harder to do in higher education doesn't mean we shouldn't attempt it as best we can now and continuously improve our ability to do it over time.
As a practical matter, measurement today permeates every segment of American life and industry. Assessment in higher education, whether welcomed or not, is more and more inevitable. And moreover, in the years ahead, the results of more and better assessments will increasingly become available as part of an open, public database. Today, the results of our evaluations are kept under lock and key. By 2020 or sooner, not only will the people who run universities know much more about what is working and what is not working and why, but what we know will be available to all.
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