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Choreography. Most organizations seek "high performance." Today, performance is no longer enough: excelling in yesterday's terms is excelling at the wrong things. This is downright self-destructive (just ask Wall Street). Today's radical innovators aren't merely mute performers, precisely executing the empty steps of a meaningless dance: they're more like choreographers. Choreographers define the steps of a better dance — they lay down better rules for interactions between supply and demand to take place.

The economy has suffered changes so deep and fundamental that institutions cannot just hunker down to weather the storm. The time has come for creative reconstruction. We must summon the courage and will to re-engineer education in ways founded on shared responsibility, demanding hard work and a willingness on the part of everyone involved to let go of "the way it's always been."

We need to break down expectations based on entitlement and focus on educational productivity and outcomes. Institutions should review redundancies, rethink staffing models, and streamline business practices. Productivity measures should be applied in all areas. In the same way that secondary schools are being challenged to consider longer school days and an extended academic year, we in higher education need to revisit basic assumptions about how we deliver higher education to students. We should not be tied to any one model or structure.

For example, we should re-evaluate the notion that large classes are inherently pedagogically unsound. What both students and faculty members tend to prefer—small classes—is not the only educationally effective approach. Although no one would advocate for large classes in every discipline or instance, we should review what we do in light of new financial contingencies, while keeping an eye on what students learn.

Gathering valid data about student performance levels and performance improvement requires making comparisons relative to fixed benchmarks and that can only be done when the assessments are standardized. Consequently, we urge the higher education community to embrace authentic, standardized performance-assessment approaches so as to gather valid data that can be used to improve teaching and learning as well as meet its obligations to external audiences to account for its actions and outcomes regarding student learning.

October 26, 2009, 02:53 PM ET Most Colleges Try to Assess Student Learning, Survey Finds A large majority of American colleges make at least some formal effort to assess their students' learning, but most have few or no staff members dedicated to doing so. Those are among the findings of a survey report released Monday by the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment, a year-old project based at Indiana University and the University of Illinois. Of more than 1,500 provosts' offices that responded to the survey, nearly two-thirds said their institutions had two or fewer employees assigned to student assessment. Among large research universities, almost 80 percent cited a lack of faculty engagement as the most serious barrier to student-assessment projects.

The assessment movement has firmly taken hold in American higher education, if you judge it by how many colleges are engaged in measuring what undergraduates learn. But if you judge by how many of them use that information to do something, the picture is different.

The most common approach used for institutional assessment is a nationally normed survey of students.

ut the survey found more attention to learning outcomes at the program level, especially by community colleges.)

If assessment is going to be required by accrediting bodies and top administrators, then we need administrative support and oversight of assessment on campus, rather than once again offloading more work onto faculty members squeezed by teaching & research inflation.

Outcomes assessment does not have to be in the form of standardized tests, nor does including assessment in faculty review have to translate into percentages achieving a particular score on such a test. What it does mean is that when the annual review comes along, one should be prepared to answer the question, "How do you know that what you're doing results in student learning?" We've all had the experience of realizing at times that students took in something very different from what we intended (if we were paying attention at all). So it's reasonable to be asked about how you do look at that question and how you decide when your current practice is successful or when it needs to be modified. That's simply being a reflective practitioner in the classroom which is the bare minimum students should expect from us. And that's all assessment is - answering that question, reflecting on what you find, and taking next steps to keep doing what works well and find better solutions for the things that aren't working well.

What we want is for assessment to become a public, shared responsibility, so there should be departmental leadership.

The validity of a measure is based on evidence regarding the inferences and assumptions that are intended to be made and the uses to which the measure will be put. Showing that the three tests in question are comparable does not support Shulenburger's assertion regarding the value-added measure as a valid indicator of institutional effectiveness. The claim that public university groups have previously judged the value-added measure as appropriate does not tell us anything about the evidence upon which this judgment was based nor the conditions under which the judgment was reached. As someone familiar with the process, I would assert that there was no compelling evidence presented that these instruments and the value-added measure were validated for making this assertion (no such evidence was available at the time), which is the intended use in the VSA.

(however much the sellers of these tests tell you that those samples are "representative"), they provide an easy way out for academic administrators who want to avoid the time-and-effort consuming but incredibly valuable task of developing detailed major program learning outcome statements (even the specialized accrediting bodies don't get down to the level of discrete, operational statements that guide faculty toward appropriate assessment design)

f somebody really cared about "value added," they could look at each student's first essay in this course, and compare it with that same student's last essay in this course. This person could then evaluate each individual student's increased mastery of the subject-matter in the course (there's a lot) and also the increased writing skill, if any.

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.

Standardized direct measures, like the Major Field Test for M.B.A. graduates?

In the absence of detailed guidance, the panel defined sizable and sustained effects through case discussion

The Top Tier initiative's choice of broad topics (such as early childhood interventions), emphasis on long-term effects, and use of narrow evidence criteria combine to provide limited information on what is effective in achieving specific outcomes.

Several rigorous alternatives to randomized experiments are considered appropriate for other situations: quasi-experimental comparison group studies, statistical analyses of observational data, and--in some circumstances--in-depth case studies. The credibility of their estimates of program effects relies on how well the studies' designs rule out competing causal explanations.