At Colleges, Assessment Satisfies Only Accreditors - Letters to the Editor - The Chroni... - 2 views
-
Some of that is due to the influence of the traditional academic freedom that faculty members have enjoyed. Some of it is ego. And some of it is lack of understanding of how it can work. There is also a huge disconnect between satisfying outside parties, like accreditors and the government, and using assessment as a quality-improvement system.
-
We are driven by regional accreditation and program-level accreditation, not by quality improvement. At our institution, we talk about assessment a lot, and do just enough to satisfy the requirements of our outside reviewers.
- ...5 more annotations...
-
The problem with the test is that it does not directly align with our program's learning outcomes and it does not yield useful information for closing the loop. So why do we use it? Because it is accepted by accreditors as a direct measure and it is less expensive and time-consuming than more useful tools.
-
Without exception, the most useful information for improving the program and student learning comes from the anecdotal and indirect information.
-
We don't have the time and the resources to do what we really want to do to continuously improve the quality of our programs and instruction. We don't have a culture of continuous improvement. We don't make changes on a regular basis, because we are trapped by the catalog publishing cycle, accreditation visits, and the entrenched misunderstanding of the purposes of assessment.
-
The institutions that use it are ones that have adequate resources to do so. The time necessary for training, whole-system involvement, and developing the programs for improvement is daunting. And it is only being used by one regional accrediting body, as far as I know.
-
Until higher education as a whole is willing to look at changing its approach to assessment, I don't think it will happen