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Measure or Perish - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 3 views

chronicle.com/...125671

shared by Judy Rumph on 14 Dec 10 - No Cached

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Views: Why Are We Assessing? - Inside Higher Ed - 1 views

www.insidehighered.com/...suskie Assessment

shared by Judy Rumph on 26 Oct 10 - No Cached

Amid all this progress, however, we seem to have lost our way. Too many of us have focused on the route we’re traveling: whether assessment should be value-added; the improvement versus accountability debate; entering assessment data into a database; pulling together a report for an accreditor. We’ve been so focused on the details of our route that we’ve lost sight of our destinatio
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Our destination, which is what we should be focusing on, is the purpose of assessment. Over the last decades, we've consistently talked about two purposes of assessment: improvement and accountability. The thinking has been that improvement means using assessment to identify problems — things that need improvement — while accountability means using assessment to show that we're already doing a great job and need no improvement. A great deal has been written about the need to reconcile these two seemingly disparate purposes.
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The most important purpose of assessment should be not improvement or accountability but their common aim: everyone wants students to get the best possible education
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Our second common purpose of assessment should be making sure not only that students learn what’s important, but that their learning is of appropriate scope, depth, and rigo
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Third, we need to accept how good we already are, so we can recognize success when we see i
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And we haven’t figured out a way to tell the story of our effectiveness in 25 words or less, which is what busy people want and nee
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Because we're not telling the stories of our successful outcomes in simple, understandable terms, the public continues to define quality using the outdated concept of inputs like faculty credentials, student aptitude, and institutional wealth — things that by themselves don’t say a whole lot about student learning.
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And people like to invest in success. Because the public doesn't know how good we are at helping students learn, it doesn't yet give us all the support we need in our quest to give our students the best possible education.
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But while virtually every college and university has had to make draconian budget cuts in the last couple of years, with more to come, I wonder how many are using solid, systematic evidence — including assessment evidence — to inform those decisions.
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Now is the time to move our focus from the road we are traveling to our destination: a point at which we all are prudent, informed stewards of our resources… a point at which we each have clear, appropriate, justifiable, and externally-informed standards for student learning. Most importantly, now is the time to move our focus from assessment to learning, and to keeping our promises. Only then can we make higher education as great as it needs to be.
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Blog U.: It Boils Down to... - Confessions of a Community College Dean - Inside Higher Ed - 4 views

www.insidehighered.com/...it_boils_down_to Outcomes Assessment accountability

shared by Judy Rumph on 29 Sep 10 - No Cached

I had a conversation a few days ago with a professor who helped me understand some of the otherwise-puzzling opposition faculty have shown to actually using the general education outcomes they themselves voted into place.
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Yet getting those outcomes from ‘adopted’ to ‘used’ has proved a long, hard slog.
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The delicate balance is in respecting the ambitions of the various disciplines, while still maintaining -- correctly, in my view -- that you can’t just assume that the whole of a degree is equal to the sum of its parts. Even if each course works on its own terms, if the mix of courses is wrong, the students will finish with meaningful gaps. Catching those gaps can help you determine what’s missing, which is where assessment is supposed to come in. But there’s some local history to overcome first.
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Judy Rumph on 29 Sep 10

This is an interesting take on what we are doing and the comments interesting

<div class="cArrow"> </div><div class="cContentInner">This is an interesting take on what we are doing and the comments interesting</div>

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